A wonderful heart: the films of William Wyler 9780786435739, 0786435739, 9781476603490, 1476603499

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A Wonderful Heart

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BY

NEIL SINYARD

Fred Zinnemann: Films of Character and Conscience (2003)

A Wonderful Heart The Films of William Wyler NEIL SINYARD

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

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Sinyard, Neil. A wonderful heart : the films of William Wyler / Neil Sinyard. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-3573-9 softcover : acid free paper

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1. Wyler, William, 1902–1981. I. Title PN1998.3.W95S56 2013 791.4302'33092—dc23 BRITISH LIBRARY

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© 2013 Neil Sinyard. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. On the cover: top Anthony Perkins as “Josh” breaks with his religious faith and joins the defending militia of the Civil War; bottom Anthony Perkins, Dorothy McGuire and Gary Cooper in Friendly Persuasion, 1956 (both Photofest) Manufactured in the United States of America

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Acknowledgments This manuscript has taken me ten years to complete and has occupied my thoughts for more than half a lifetime. I owe a debt of gratitude to the Leverhulme Institute for their award of an Emeritus Fellowship which facilitated a research trip to Los Angeles. The sympathetic and considerate way in which the award was administered was much appreciated. Without in any way trying to influence what I wrote (the views and errors are entirely my own), the Wyler family has always been enormously supportive of this venture. Wyler’s eldest daughter, Catherine (whose documentary on her father, Directed by William Wyler, is the finest account on film of his life and career), has been the most helpful and encouraging of e-mail correspondents; and his son, David, very kindly gave of his time during my stay in Los Angeles to talk about his father’s work. If the Wyler family feel I have done justice to the films, I will be well content; and it is with the deepest respect that I dedicate this book to them. Sincere thanks also go to the following: my dear friend Haya Harareet Clayton, for sharing with me her recollections of being directed by Wyler in Ben-Hur; Omar Sharif, for talking to me openly about his experience of working with Wyler on Funny Girl; Susanna Moross Tarjan, for her stimulating correspondence and her generosity in supplying me with materials about her father, Jerome Moross, whose score for Wyler’s The Big Country is one of the enduring glories of that movie and of film music in general; Dr. Susan Smith, for generously sending me her thoughts on Funny Girl; Professor Colin Gardner, for helpfully supplying me with a copy of Karel Reisz’s Sequence article on Wyler, one of the most important of the early critical studies of his work; Erin Fares, for kindly making available to me a copy of one of the rarest and finest of Wyler’s early talkies, A House Divided; and Nathalie Morris and the Archive and the Information team at the British Film Institute, for their ready response to my queries. All Wyler scholars are indebted to the pioneering critical commentary on his films by writers such as Graham Greene, André Bazin, Michael Anderegg, and Louis D. Giannetti, among others, not to mention the work of his two excellent biographers, Axel Madsen and Jan Herman, and the thorough reference work of Sharon Kern. In projects such as this also, one is always given impetus by the encouragement of one’s closest friends. In this regard, I would like to give a special mention to Adrian Turner, the late Gillian West, Pete Walsh, Brian McFarlane, David Rolinson, and Melanie Williams. My biggest thanks of all, as always, go to my wonderful family: my wife Lesley, and my children Nathalie, Jessica, and Joel, who have provided rock-solid emotional and intellectual support of a value beyond measure throughout the long process of completing this work. Special thanks should go to Jessica, who has consistently put her computer wizardry at my service and provided all-round invaluable assistance, particularly during my research time in Los Angeles. v

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In an essay on criticism in Two Cheers for Democracy, E. M. Forster wrote: “The only activity which can establish a raison d’etre for criticism in the arts is love. However cautiously, with whatever reservations, after whatsoever purifications, we must come back to love.” I agree with that. This book has truly been a labor of love, and my fervent hope is that, for the reader, the labor is less apparent than the love.

Table of Contents Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v Introduction: A Wonderful Heart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 ONE. Early Life and Films . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 TWO. Enter Sam Goldwyn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 THREE. Three Little Foxes: Davis and Wyler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 FOUR. War and Its Aftermath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 FIVE. The Paramount Films . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 SIX. Pacificism and Revenge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 SEVEN. Revision and Renewal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 Filmography and Awards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243

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Introduction: A Wonderful Heart “I think one of the best emotional scenes I’ve ever seen is in Willy Wyler’s The Best Years of our Lives, where Fredric March comes back at the end of the war.... It makes me choke even now. He’s a master at it. I think it’s because he has a wonderful heart. He had a wonderful heart, Willy. I loved him.” — David Lean, quoted in Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, edited by George Stevens, Jr.

One of the indisputably major directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, William Wyler died of a heart attack in Beverly Hills, California, on July 27, 1981, at the age of 79. His last public appearance was at the National Film Theatre in London in May of that year, where he was interviewed on stage by Adrian Turner as part of a lecture series organized by the Guardian newspaper. (An edited version of the interview was later published in the magazine Films and Filming; see Bibliography.) The occasion was also part of a retrospective of Wyler’s work that had been programmed by the NFT. Having written the program notes for the Wyler season, I was invited to attend the lecture, and I have two particularly vivid memories of the occasion. The first memory is perhaps an unexpected one: how witty Wyler was. Even though I was to learn later that he was far from well on that day, an audience would not have suspected that from his performance, for his conversation was laced with a delightfully droll sense of humor. This might seem surprising in a director who averaged about one comedy every fifteen years, but I later reflected that his films, even the overtly serious ones, contain an enormous amount of humor. One of his notes on the script of Wuthering Heights (1939) says it is “important to have as much comedy in the picture as possible”; and even in an epic like Ben-Hur (1959), one could still relish the mischief of Hugh Griffith’s Sheikh, whether he is drying his hands after a meal on the clothes of a passing servant or screaming at a maladroit charioteer, “Do you think you can treat my horses like animals?!” It confirmed what Jessamyn West noted in her book on the making of Friendly Persuasion (1956): “Wyler seems to be wholly himself [when] laughing” (West: 105). My other dominant memory of the occasion is the warmth of the reception given to Wyler by a packed house. I was to remember that later, when the British Film Institute attempted to quantify the 100 most popular films shown in British cinemas during the twentieth century and Wyler had four films that qualified, making him by far the most popular Hollywood director of his era for U.K. audiences. Indeed, although it had not been a 1

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huge success in America, The Big Country (1958) was the most popular American film of its year in the U.K. and, in the same BFI poll on film tastes among U.K. audiences, the most popular western of all time. However, I felt that the audience enthusiasm had another impulse behind it beyond grateful recognition for a magnificent career. It was also an implied rebuke to a critical establishment that had, for a number of years, and certainly post–BenHur, ignored Wyler’s achievement as a major director. In an article published later that year in The Movie magazine, John Russell Taylor concluded his analysis of Wyler’s career with the following words: “If in the final analysis, Wyler is not accounted a great director, there is no question that he has made a fair handful of great films” (495). It is difficult to reconcile the second part of that statement with the qualified assertion of the first. After all, what is a great director but someone who “has made a fair handful of great films”? The problem with Wyler might be in defining the precise nature of his greatness. Unlike John Ford or Howard Hawks, for example, the personality behind a Wyler film is elusive. The nearest he came to defining his own credo as a director came shortly after the making of The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), when he wrote an article for The Screen Writer (February 1947) entitled “No Magic Wand.” “I have always tried to direct my own pictures out of my own feelings and out of my own approach to life,” he wrote, but it was clear his means of doing so was through a style that was unobtrusive and did not draw attention to itself in a manner that might distract from the material. He never sought to dazzle or amaze through pictorial virtuosity. “I have never been as interested in the externals of presenting a scene as I have been in the inner workings of the people the scene is about,” he wrote, which one could say is the diametric opposite to the approach of someone like Alfred Hitchcock. “I am not minimizing the importance of correct use of the camera or staging of the action,” he went on. “I mean that they are important only as they help the audience understand what the character is thinking, feeling, saying or doing” (Koszarski: 112). Wyler’s most eloquent early champion, the critic André Bazin, in his famous 1948 essay for Revue de Cinema entitled “William Wyler, or the Jansenist of Directing,” astutely characterized his style as a “science of clarity obtained through the austerity of the form as well as through equal humility towards his subject-matter and his audience” (Cardullo: 17). Bazin’s reference to Wyler’s “humility” toward his subject and his audience is significant. In her eulogy for Wyler on the occasion of his Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, Lillian Hellman was to use the same word about him. “There is always something wonderful about watching a man totally devoted to what he is doing,” she said, “sure enough to be open-minded, skilled but deeply modest, giving and learning with equal humility.” Unlike other cinematic masters such as Chaplin, Fellini, or Welles, Wyler never saw the cinema as an expression or extension of his own ego. There is an intriguing contradiction between Wyler’s much-documented tough and tyrannical behavior on the set (“If I have to choose between personal popularity or the popularity of my pictures,” he wrote, “I have to choose the picture every time”) and the invisible directorial hand that guides the finished film. At a time when visual style and personal expression were all the rage in film criticism and Hollywood reputations were being upended during the heyday of Cahiers du Cinema and Andrew Sarris’s idiosyncratic application of the auteur theory during the mid– 1950s and early 1960s, Wyler became one of the victims of critical fashion, an Oscar winner of the period who, along with, for example, George Stevens, David Lean, Fred Zinnemann, Elia Kazan, and Billy Wilder, had to be discredited to give the auteurists the maximum mileage of controversy. He had been championed by critics like John Grierson and André Bazin, so that, when their theoretical ideas came under fire, it was inevitable that the films

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they had supported as part of their argument were subjected to the same attack. Yet a great film can still be a great film, even if it might be praised for the wrong reasons. In fact, Bazin was right about Wyler. Unlike Tom Milne who, in Godard on Godard, wrote that “French critics have always had a weakness for bold antithesis, generally expressed in ringing catchphrases: as an example one might cite Roger Leenhardt’s singularly unfortunate ‘Down with Ford, long live Wyler!’” (255), I find nothing “unfortunate” about that sentiment, other than the fact that it seems unnecessary to denigrate one great director in order to elevate another. It is true that Bazin was to revise his opinion of Wyler in the light of his post– 1946 films and elevate Ford above him in his pantheon when revisiting his critical writings in 1958, but he would still conclude that “both directors have their intrinsic artistic values and ... that one may continue to prefer the ‘writing in cinema’ of some of Wyler’s films to the spectacular cinema of John Ford” (Cardullo: 22). This book is an elaboration of that preference. Several issues that counted against Wyler’s reputation at this time continue to trouble critics. One was his indebtedness to writers such as Sidney Kingsley and Lillian Hellman, and his frequent recourse to literary and theatrical originals for his film material. This seemed to militate the idea of an original, individual, creative talent. Wyler might well have compounded this impression, when he was the 1976 recipient of the annual Life Achievement Award by the American Film Institute. In his acceptance speech, he said, “When I was directing films from scripts by Lillian Hellman, Bob Sherwood, or Sidney Kingsley, I could hardly call myself an auteur— although I’m one of the few American directors who can pronounce the word correctly” (Phillips: 5). The aside is not only evidence of the dry humor mentioned earlier, but a reminder of Wyler’s origins: he was born in Alsace-Lorraine, which became French territory but was part of Germany at the time of his birth; the European element in Wyler’s background is very important in an understanding of his films. Yet the critical dismissal of his work seemed too facile. Film has always been a collaborative art, heavily dependent on adaptations. Wyler was no more or no less dependent on a good script than, say, Alfred Hitchcock, a major difference being that Wyler was much more generous in his acknowledgment of his collaborators than was the Master of Suspense. He might lean to the novel or the drama for inspiration but that does not necessarily mean slavish reproduction or unimaginative style. There are few finer examples of filmed theater than The Little Foxes (1941) or more intelligent and enduring cinematic treatments of a classic novel than The Heiress (1949), Wyler’s interpretation of Henry James’s Washington Square, or Carrie (1952), his adaptation of Theodore Dreiser. In one of the finest examples of early criticism on Wyler, Karel Reisz put this nicely when discussing The Little Foxes and Wyler’s deployment of stage conventions without sacrificing pictorial values: “To call his work ‘theatrical’ is, then, to recognise a style rather than to imply a weakness” (Reisz: 22). Also, if the critics could not perceive an exceptional talent behind the camera, Wyler’s cinematic peers certainly could. As his associate producer on Friendly Persuasion (1956), Stuart Millar, remarked, “Willy’s a great one to bring out the best in people working for him” (West: 206). Among the plethora of awards both for himself and for others, which place him among the most honored directors in film history (his films have been nominated for an unequaled total of 127 Oscars and he himself has received more Oscar nominations than any other filmmaker and directed more than a dozen performers to Oscar-winning performances), actors as diverse as Laurence Olivier, Bette Davis, and Charlton Heston described him as the best film director they ever worked for. Olivier said Wyler taught him how to act for the camera. Heston found the experience of being directed by him was a bit

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like taking a Turkish bath, where you feel you might drown but come out smelling like a rose. Bette Davis paid him the ultimate compliment of calling him “a male Bette Davis” (Davis: 204). When I asked Haya Harareet, the beautiful leading actress of Ben-Hur, what she thought was the secret of Wyler’s greatness as a director, she mentioned his capacity for total concentration, to the absolute exclusion of everything else. At the point when he was preparing to shoot, his senses were heightened to a new intensity, so that even though he was deaf in one ear, his hearing, Haya thought, seemed at that moment to be sharper than hers. (He had actually found a way of dealing with that handicap by plugging himself into the soundman’s microphones.) Fred Zinnemann once told me the story of Wyler’s directing Laurence Olivier in a marital row scene in Carrie (1952) and demanding retake after retake. “For God’s sake, Willy,” Olivier stormed at him, “what do you want?” Replied Wyler, quietly: “I want it better.” In the next take, Olivier was so angry that when he stormed out of the room, he almost slipped on the stairs, at which point Wyler said, “Cut”; that was the spark he had been waiting for. (Bette Davis recalled a similar scene in Jezebel when a scene between her and Margaret Lindsay seemed unable to satisfy the director until he hit on the core of the scene and focused on Lindsay’s wedding ring, the symbol of love that Davis covets and cannot have.) When an actor once berated Wyler for not telling him when a take was good, Wyler replied: “Look, see that camera there? When the camera moves away to another position, then that’s a great compliment —that means you were good” (Stevens Jr.: 208). Never the most demonstrative or articulate of directors, he was nevertheless supreme in his choice of the best take and his judgment of when the take worked. Although John Mills, who was directed by Wyler in the live television version of The Letter in 1956, would insist that Take 1 was invariably the best and that by Take 15 all freshness had gone, he conceded that “there is one great director, whom I have known and admired for many years, who shoots many takes and then unerringly picks the best one; but exceptions prove the rule — there is only one William Wyler” (Mills: 169). Orson Welles thought Wyler was one of those directors who seemed not to direct but rather waited for something to happen. “As a producer,” Welles told the interviewers of Cahiers du Cinema (April 1965)— that is, someone whose methods produce unexpected and memorable results —“Wyler is extraordinary.” Wyler’s critical reputation had particularly declined in the wake of the popular and Oscar-winning success of the Biblical epic, Ben-Hur. After a lifetime of quality cinema, he had dared — or descended — to make a film based on what Leslie Fiedler had described as one of the worst American novels ever written (but then, so was Birth of a Nation) and in what was at the time the most critically despised of genres, the Hollywood epic. Now that the genre has deservedly been revalued and upgraded, and that estimable writers such as Christopher Fry and Gore Vidal have been acknowledged for their contributions to the screenplay, such critical condescension seems misplaced. Moreover, the themes of pacifism and revenge and the struggle for freedom by the Jews engage Wyler’s directorial passions as powerfully as in his other works. Fifty years on, it still looks like not only the greatest of Hollywood spectaculars of this time but one of the finest epics of the screen. By the time of his death, Wyler’s reputation had also suffered because of his association with Samuel Goldwyn and the critical disdain in some quarters for Goldwyn’s films, with their plush production surfaces and their comfortable characterization within a narrow realist range. It is certainly true that Goldwyn was an enormously important influence on Wyler’s career and that the director’s early reputation was essentially founded on such Gold-

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wyn films as These Three (1936), Dodsworth (1936), and Dead End (1937). Yet one should be cautious of identifying Wyler too closely with the Goldwyn ethic and forgetting that the relationship between the two was frequently stormy. Wyler disliked the studio-bound artificiality of Dead End; fought Goldwyn over the ending of Wuthering Heights; and was sufficiently dissatisfied with These Three to remake it years later as the greatly superior The Children’s Hour (1961). If one is talking of indebtedness, it is Goldwyn, not Wyler, who owes a debt. Subtract Wyler from the Goldwyn account and there is not a lot left. In fact, there is a case for saying that the best of Wyler’s early films, like Jezebel (1938) and The Letter (1940), were those that were made away from Goldwyn and when Wyler was on loan. Wyler’s last film for Goldwyn, The Best Years of Our Lives, has been taken as the definitive example of the Goldwyn ideal: the cinema of social optimism and cultural conservatism. The film has never looked particularly optimistic to me, though the decent humanism that Thomas Mann so admired about the film is still deeply affecting. It is often forgotten that the title is ironic. Even the affirmation of the wedding at the end is qualified by one of Wyler’s most famous deep-focus shots, impeccably composed by the great cameraman Gregg Toland to show three couples to whom the words of the marriage vows have a completely different meaning and implication — joyous, bitter and ironic. Elsewhere, the film pulls no punches in its depiction of the rough postwar scramble for jobs; the split between what various forms of propaganda had promised for people after the war and what they actually found; and the way strong and capable women had to step aside and subordinate themselves to less capable men and feel that this was the right thing to do. It seemed to foreshadow an anxiety in Wyler about the way America was going and heralded what I believe is the great period of Wyler’s achievement — the films between 1946 and 1961— where that unease finds original and eloquent expression. In any event, Best Years was a crucial film in Wyler’s development and achievement. In one of his interviews with Cameron Crowe toward the end of his life, Wyler’s great contemporary and friend, Billy Wilder, described it as the best-directed film he had ever seen (Crowe: 110). In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee began its infamous investigation of Hollywood to root out communism and even liberalism in the film industry. In a coastto-coast American Broadcasting Company program aired on October 26 of that year entitled “Hollywood Fights Back,” Wyler stated that as a result of the activities of that committee, he was convinced that he would not be allowed to make The Best Years of Our Lives as it had been made a year ago. “They are making decent people afraid to express their opinions,” he said. From then on, his view of America in his films becomes more bitter and sardonic. Detective Story (1951) anticipated the brutal cop cycle of the early 1970s, with the Kirk Douglas hero an embryonic Popeye Doyle or Dirty Harry. Wyler’s adaptation of a Theodore Dreiser classic, Carrie, was an uncompromising picture of poverty and degradation, made at a time when pessimism was synonymous with being unpatriotic and in which Laurence Olivier gave one of the screen’s greatest performances. Wyler’s version of The Desperate Hours (1955), sometimes regarded as a paean to the resilience of middle America in the face of an external threat, actually looks more like the reverse: a critique of middle-class complacency in which the pompous social assumptions of an American family are turned upside down by events. That grandest yet most ironic of westerns, The Big Country (1958), surveyed the westerner’s delusions of grandeur and his instinct for confrontation, seen from the perspective of an easterner who questions the need for it. Never has the tendency of Americans to try to act on a scale that measures up to their surroundings been sent up in a more scintillatingly civilized manner. Wyler’s last film, The Liberation of L.B. Jones (1970), was one

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of the most incisive indictments of racial prejudice ever filmed. Even at the time, some critics were taken aback. “In an area where it would seem impossible to find anything fresh to say,” wrote Moira Walsh in the journal America (April 4, 1970), “the film has the impact of a 10-ton truck.... We come away with a little more comprehension of black rage.” What, then, was the key to Wyler’s style and his main themes and ideas? It was perhaps somewhat obscured by his versatility. A determination not to repeat oneself (as David Lean used to advise, “Never come out of the same hole”) was a quality often undervalued during the heyday of the auteur theory. Wyler was not a genre director, like Anthony Mann or Douglas Sirk or Vincente Minnelli, so he did not have an obvious set of formal conventions for his talent to “transcend.” He was therefore accused of having no personal style or world view, largely because he continually experimented with different subject matter. More like John Huston, say, than Howard Hawks, he did not impose his personality on the material so much as let the material impose its personality on him. Yet viewed in its totality, Wyler’s work does begin to disclose certain patterns that challenge the idea of impersonality. Wyler was essentially an indoors director, less interested in formal beauty than in dramatic conflict and more interested in action in character than character in action. “I always loved the theater,” he once said, “and always felt the restriction of the silent screen” (Stevens Jr.: 206), thus distinguishing himself from directors like, say, Ford, Chaplin and Hitchcock, who had not felt this restriction and had to adjust their styles to accommodate the coming of sound. Wyler could generate more drama out of a house than most other directors out of a location, reflecting the inclinations of a man drawn to interior dramas in which rooms serve as a projection of the people who inhabit them. The power dynamics in The Heiress are almost entirely conveyed through the way Wyler positions the actors in the frame. Even the decision to sit or stand becomes a tense matter at certain stages for the characters, aware that what they choose to do would be a taking or ceding of initiative. One visual signature was his use of staircases. When questioned about this in his National Film Theatre interview and asked whether they were written into the script or added by him at a later stage, Wyler replied: “Sometimes they were deliberately added by me. You can make a scene more dramatic if two people are on a staircase than if they are sitting on a sofa. If you use them properly, staircases can give you marvelous camera movement and people can back down them or rise up them to reflect their characters and relationships” (Turner: 13). Wyler is emphasizing there his dramatic use of space for psychological revelation or disclosure. A staircase sometimes divides the civilized arena of drawing and dining rooms from the private bedrooms in which hellish marriages are quietly endured; it becomes a battleground for territorial advantage that signifies momentary emotional or economic dominance. Wyler had an unerring gift for locating the precise place in a scene where the maximum dramatic intensity is to be felt, like that early moment in The Children’s Hour when Martha (Shirley MacLaine) is recalling when she first saw Karen (Audrey Hepburn) and her line, “I remember thinking ‘What a pretty girl’”— tellingly delivered by MacLaine and timed to perfection by Wyler in his filming — is left momentarily hanging in the air, like a verbal slip or an involuntary self-disclosure. A more famous moment is the close-up of Bette Davis in The Little Foxes when she refuses to move from her chair to help her dying husband (Herbert Marshall), and where the camera’s immobility both emphasizes the character’s own stillness and seems to invite us to scrutinize the darkness of her mind. His characters often had a sense of the dramatic, and he had a terrific flair for the set-piece that goes sour or maximizes public embarrassment, like Heathcliff ’s electrifying return in Wuthering

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Heights, which threatens the stability of the household at Thrushcross Grange; or the first entrance of Burl Ives’s Rufus Hannassey at the engagement party in The Big Country, where the atmosphere of elegance is suddenly filled with an outsider’s rage; or, most famously, the disastrous appearance of the heroine (Bette Davis) in the red dress at the ball in Jezebel, an act of impulsive defiance that will have consequences for the rest of her life. Although he made some exquisite comedies, Wyler was by instinct a tragedian. We will find heroes who are often passive figures who needed to be convinced of the necessity of action. This became a key motif in his films of the late 1950s, such as Friendly Persuasion and The Big Country. These troubled heroes are framed by men such as those played by Laurence Olivier in Carrie and James Garner in The Children’s Hour, who become progressively ineffective. His male protagonists had few of the characteristics of American certainty and self-assertiveness typical of Hollywood masculinity in film: they tended to be much more contemplative, cerebral, and withdrawn. In comparison with Ford and Hawks, a Wyler film with John Wayne would be unthinkable; and indeed, surely only Wyler could have written that wonderfully deadpan eulogy to Wayne in the letter pages of Newsweek (August 6, 1979) in response to the magazine’s fulsome obituary. “Nobody has given John Wayne his proper due as an actor,” Wyler began, with deceptive innocence. “He created in the eyes and minds of millions of his countrymen the image of the great American hero fighting for God and country in all services and in all wars. And it was all done before cameras in Hollywood and on safe locations. That’s damn good acting!” Wyler’s withering irony directed at Wayne’s “act” of being a hero, undoubtedly fueled by his disdain for Wayne’s war record compared with that of some of Wyler’s subsequently blacklisted friends, and his distaste at Wayne’s reactionary Red-baiting during the McCarthy years, gives an insight into Wyler’s perception of what constitutes true heroism and courage. (It also earned him a letter expressing profound thanks from Frank Capra, who, although politically miles apart from Wyler, was a victim of Wayne’s xenophobia and thought Wyler’s words both true and timely.) Even Wyler films featuring Humphrey Bogart in his tough-guy persona — Dead End, The Desperate Hours— significantly have the actor at his most vulnerable (he is actually to be killed in both); and in Ben-Hur, Wyler can only fully endorse the hero when he renounces violence at the end. His films, then, played in an unusual manner with stereotypical gender roles. Machismo was entirely absent. Indeed, his heroes are not afraid to satirize notions of masculinity. Gregory Peck in The Big Country and Peter O’Toole in How to Steal a Million (1966) both pretend to faint at the heroines’ aggressive behavior. When Omar Sharif forbids Barbra Streisand from seeing him off on the ocean liner in Funny Girl and she asks him whether he is afraid she will cry, he replies, “No, I’m afraid I will.” In The Best Years of Our Lives, all three of the main male characters have to be undressed and put to bed by their womenfolk. By way of contrast, the heroines were invariably more dynamic, a dynamism in some ways the product of their resistance and anger toward a patronizing, patriarchal social order that thwarts their potential and, in some cases, poisons their personalities. Marriage and the family were often the prisons against which the characters were struggling. The struggle is given an added twist of intensity by taking place in enclosed surroundings that thrust antagonistic or threatened characters together in tense proximity. Imprisonment within a domestic space is a crucial plot element of The Desperate Hours, The Children’s Hour, and The Collector (1965); and the idea of the family home as prison is strongly felt in The Heiress and Carrie. No director ever had a surer sense of those small cuts of cumulative disgust and disdain that slowly destroy a person’s soul. There is an evocative description by the great Japanese

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director Yasujiro Ozu of a moment he particularly admired in The Little Foxes for its acting and directing where, as he put it, “Bette Davis is standing by her dying husband and making tea: no facial expression or anything — just making tea without any emotion. The only thing you can hear is the click of the cup and the saucer” (Richie: 258). It is a moment in miniature of the whole marriage in all its misery, malice, and murderous silence. Similarly, Dodsworth, The Letter, The Heiress, and Carrie, for example, contain some of the deadliest moments of domestic cruelty in American cinema. Robin Wood once categorized Wyler as an “archetypally bourgeois” director, but it has always struck me as a strange observation (Wood: 184). The subtext of Wyler’s work has always seemed to be “The Discreet Chill of the Bourgeoisie,” which recognizes the pain that can lurk beneath the most respectable family facades. When the formerly timid heroine in The Heiress bars the door against the suitor who once jilted her, her aunt wonders how she can be so unfeeling, but the heroine has an explanation for her cruelty. “I have been taught by masters,” she replies, her stress on the gender of her tormentors being particularly significant: she is referring not only to the suitor who broke her heart but even more to a father whom she adored and whom she belatedly recognized as actually despising her. It is striking how often, in evoking this world, Wyler’s films stray into the realms of horror. Gothic horror infiltrates the worlds of Wuthering Heights and The Collector; and there are references to “freaks” in The Best Years of Our Lives and The Children’s Hour, as vulnerable characters are tormented by the mocking stare of so-called “normal” children and adults. The Little Foxes builds to its chilling climax through an extraordinary accumulation of horror film imagery: the disembodied hand on the chair as Davis refuses to move or be moved by her husband’s dying plea for help; the haunted room that she is afraid to enter; the final window shot as her face is covered by shadow. The Children’s Hour can be read as a modern horror story, with the demonic child anticipating developments in the 1970s in films such as The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976). The accusation of a lesbian relationship leads to the two teachers being treated as freaks and nearly moved to selfdisgust because of the values of “normal” society; and where the real monster is surely the kind of inflexible and destructive social righteousness represented by the grandmother. “For anyone who knows the American upper-middle classes of Philadelphia and Boston,” declared the great French director Jean-Pierre Melville, “it is a magnificent film” (Nogueira: 95). In the light of all this, it is hard to see how anyone could say that Wyler’s films complacently endorsed bourgeois values. As well as his trademark staircase shots, there is another distinctive visual trope that recurs in Wyler’s films: what I would call the frozen confrontation. It is frozen in that it rarely leads to actual violence, but is the moment of tension when two opposed societies or ideologies — the complacent and the envious, the righteous and the rebellious — come head to head and try to face the other down. One thinks of the Lintons and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights; father and gangster in The Desperate Hours, where the latter can barely suppress a physical distaste for what the father represents and what he has been denied; Major Terrill and Rufus Hannassey in the party scene in The Big Country; the appalled grandmother and the accused schoolteachers in These Three and The Children’s Hour. It is hard to think of a Hollywood director who was more attentive than Wyler to issues and nuances of social class — it is even there in his (and arguably Hollywood’s) greatest romantic comedy, Roman Holiday (1953)— and to divisions between rich and poor in his films, divisions which often gathered to a confrontation in which deep grievances are dramatically enacted. Class and social disparity are the links between such varied works as Counsellor at Law (1933), Dead

Introduction

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End, Wuthering Heights, The Heiress, The Big Country, and The Collector. Comic variations are found not only in Roman Holiday but also in Wyler’s first sound film, The Love Trap (1929), as well as The Gay Deception (1935), The Good Fairy (1935), and How to Steal a Million. One can even find unexpected links between films through similar gestures. In The Best Years of Our Lives, Dana Andrews wakes up in a strange place, obviously a cut above the kind of surroundings he is used to, and blows the lace drapings around the bed. It is a gesture which Dewey Martin as one of the gang in The Desperate Hours is to echo as he wanders through the daughter’s bedroom, and with the same kind of implication: this house is not for the likes of you and me. It is like the small visual gesture of the affectionate squeeze of the shoulder that links Brief Encounter (1945) with Ryan’s Daughter (1970) in David Lean’s oeuvre and, for admirers of the director, triggers a small frisson and tremor of recognition. Sympathies between the characters in Wyler’s films are often finely balanced. The ostensible heroes of, say, Dodsworth, The Big Country, and Ben-Hur also have qualities of stubbornness, perversity, intractability, self-righteousness; the ostensible villains of, say, The Westerner (1940), The Little Foxes, and the suitor in The Heiress also have a great deal of charm, wit, vivacity, and capacity for life. Who exactly are the “baddies” in The Big Country? Nevertheless, the scenes one particularly remembers — the dance between Bette Davis and Henry Fonda at the ball in Jezebel, Herbert Marshall’s death in The Little Foxes, the marital rows of Carrie —dwell painfully on moments of acute social embarrassment, psychological distress, or perversities of human designs or desires. These are films that can wring the heart. Even notoriously unsentimental men like Billy Wilder and David Lean have admitted to being moved to tears by scenes in The Best Years of Our Lives, and they were not even the same scenes. After watching him direct the early scene at the Quaker Meeting in Friendly Persuasion, Jessamyn West described Wyler as having what she called “exactly the same selfforgetting love and admiration in his face that you see in the face of a mother watching her unequaled-child” (West: 311). Although much critical energy has been wasted in discussion of the director’s so-called “coldness” (see, for example, Andrew Sarris’s harsh judgment of Wyler’s career in his seminal The American Cinema), the critic Peter Baker was surely nearer the mark when, in a rave review of The Big Country in Films and Filming (February 1959), he contrasted Wyler with Ford and opined that, whereas Ford at his best “holds a tight rein on his emotions,” Wyler at his best “gushes emotion like Tchaikovsky” (Baker: 23). It is an unusual perception, because the critical consensus would tend to put it the other way around, but, in my view, it is an accurate one. It is also uncommonly perceptive because it is highly unlikely that Baker would have known that Wyler, in an interoffice communication to Carl Laemmle Jr. (March 28, 1934), once proposed a film about the life of Tchaikovsky, with Paul Lukas in the leading role. (On a more sinister note, Wyler would not have known that his attendance on December 3, 1941, at an all–Tchaikovsky concert in aid of Russian War Relief was being monitored by the FBI and would be brought up as evidence against him during the dark McCarthy years.) “Tchaikovskian emotion” certainly seems more characteristic of a Wyler film than the chill Sarris seemed to find. Wyler is a symphonist of feelings. This might incidentally help explain why so many varied film composers — Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, Hugo Friedhofer, Aaron Copland, David Raksin, Dimitri Tiomkin, Jerome Moross, Miklos Rozsa, Alex North — all surpassed themselves when scoring a Wyler film. Wyler’s films are particularly distinguished by their moral maturity. He seems fascinated by the principles that hold society together, but his observations of compassion, goodness,

10

Introduction

and love (“Everything can be told through a love story,” he once told David Lean) contend with his unflinching dramatizations of greed, prejudice, and hypocrisy. He discloses the tension between the roles people adopt in society and their perception of their own private needs and identity, often bringing them to the point where the strain of that split becomes too much to bear. This constitutes the main theme of The Letter, but also comes through in a key scene in The Best Years of Our Lives, when Fredric March’s banker makes his tipsy speech at the businessmen’s dinner and can barely conceal his distaste and frustration at the job he is required to do. Wyler’s dramas have always centered ultimately on the personal: marital strain, friendships betrayed, domestic tyranny, the clash of generations. In film after film, he pursued these themes with an acute visual sense, a maturity of mind, and a keen awareness of dramatic form. He was a great synthesizer of talents and forms. He brought the passion of the theater and the depth of the novel into the province of Hollywood commercial cinema, and thereby expanded its expressive potential. When he was interviewed in Theatre Arts (February 1947) and asked what makes a good film, Wyler thought long and hard before replying. “Some people say it just takes a good story,” he said, “but I think it takes more than that. You have to have the passion to tell the story, and you have to know how to tell it with style. That’s it, I think. A story, a passion, and a craft” (cited in Miller: 17). The following pages will chart the passion and the craft over a lifetime of filmmaking by a truly exceptional artist. It would be hard to think of his equivalent today. It is impossible to think of his equal.

ONE Early Life and Films It was the satirist Ogden Nash who composed the amusing couplet about one of Hollywood’s earliest movie moguls: “Uncle Carl Laemmle/ Has a very large faemmle.” Founder and head of Universal Studios, Carl Laemmle, affectionately known as “Uncle Carl,” was renowned for his generosity in sponsoring and finding jobs for relatives and refugees who had come to America. Eminent film personages such as Irving Thalberg, Harry Cohn, and Erich Von Stroheim were only a few of those who had been given their first break in the industry by Uncle Carl. One of the most prestigious of his beneficiaries was the son of a distant cousin, Melanie Auerbach, who had married Leopold Wyler. One of their boys, Willy, was proving something of a tearaway and seemed unable to settle into any orthodox schooling or employment. On one of his annual visits to Europe, Uncle Carl met up with his cousin and nephew in Zurich and asked Willy whether he was ambitious and whether he would like to come to America. Both queries were answered with a resounding affirmative. Fifty-five years later, when accepting the Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, William Wyler, the most honored director in American film history, acknowledged the importance of this gesture. “The one man most responsible for my being here tonight,” he said, “is Carl Laemmle, who was the president and founder of Universal Pictures. He brought me to this country and gave me my first and most important opportunities.” William Wyler was born in Mulhouse, a small town in German Alsace on July 1, 1902. His father, who was Swiss, became a successful businessman in retail haberdashery; his mother, who was German, had a more artistic disposition and indeed was to be described by one of Wyler’s screenwriters, Ruth Goetz, as one of the most cultured women she had ever met. When David Lean was to say that Wyler had all the qualities a great director needed, being, as he put it, “both a dreamer and intensely practical” (Stevens Jr.: 203), one is tempted to think back on his parents and reflect that Wyler seemed to have inherited the best qualities of both. What must also have influenced his personality was his experience in growing up during the First World War, when his home town kept falling alternately into French and German hands, so that every time a battle ended and they emerged from their shelter, the Wylers would wonder which national flag would be flying. One of the most marked characteristics of the future films of Wyler’s maturity — the absence of conventional or stereotyped heroes and villains, the capacity for seeing and presenting both points of view in a conflict — probably derives from this background. “Drama lies in the subtle complexities of life,” he was to say, “in the grays, not the blacks and whites” (Giannetti: 206). Wyler showed no special interest in the cinema when he was young, though, like most people of his age (and older), he was a huge fan of Charlie Chaplin and recalled how he and his friends would arrive half an hour before a Chaplin screening to claim the front seats, and 11

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A Wonderful Heart

would start laughing in anticipation before the film had even begun. He could not have dreamt at that time that, years later, he was to be a neighbor of Chaplin’s in Los Angeles and could tell this story to the man himself. Later still, in 1975, the year before Wyler was to receive his Life Achievement Award, he had been canvassed by Charlton Heston for his opinion on a deserving recipient of the award and Wyler had written, “Who else — but Charlie Chaplin?” Before Uncle Carl appeared on the scene, the future prospects for young Willy had looked a little dubious. In 1919, he had been sent to business school, the Ecole Superieure de Commerce in Lausane in Switzerland; and in 1920 he worked as an apprentice in a clothing store in Paris with a view to acquiring the necessary training to eventually take over his father’s business. It is probable, however, that Wyler at this time showed more dedication to his violin lessons and indeed, when he embarked to America, he took his violin with him. This enthusiasm for the instrument stayed with him for some considerable time afterwards. His correspondence reveals that he was still ordering violin catalogues in the 1930s and he even gave himself a cameo role as first violinist in a dance sequence in Dodsworth. He clearly relished the opportunity to direct the concert sequences featuring Jascha Heifetz in Goldwyn’s production, They Shall Have Music (1939). The virtuosity of Heifetz’s playing of Saint-Saens’ showpiece for violin, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, is matched by the virtuosity of the filming, with dazzling overhead shots of soloist and orchestra combined with close visual detail of Heifetz’s fiddle and fingering dexterity. It is easily the most exciting piece of cinema in the entire film. When Wyler accepted Uncle Carl’s offer of a job, the immediate appeal was not the opportunity to get a start in the movies but simply the chance to go to America. As he put it, “After I got kicked out of one or two schools, I was sent to America. In those days, you got rid of somebody by sending them to the United States” (Philips: 5). He first worked in the publicity department at Universal where he began a lifelong friendship with another of Uncle Carl’s protégés, Paul Kohner, who in due course was to become Wyler’s agent and, incidentally, was the man who introduced Wyler to his future wife, Margaret Tallichet, when they visited the set of They Shall Have Music. (Paul Kohner was also the father of actress Susan Kohner, whom film enthusiasts will remember for her superb performance as the black maid’s daughter who tries to pass for white in Douglas Sirk’s fine 1959 melodrama, Imitation of Life.) Wyler and Kohner quickly developed a lucrative line in translating Universal’s publicity material in their New York office for foreign consumption, Wyler translating into French and Kohner into German. Tiring of that, Wyler got himself transferred to the office at Universal City in California, where he performed a number of menial jobs but which did at least bring him closer to actual filmmaking. He was an assistant to an assistant director on the Lon Chaney silent-film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and was also one of the assistants helping to organize the crowd scenes for the chariot race in the silent Ben-Hur. All of this was bringing the prospect of directing a little bit closer. “When I got to be an assistant director,” he would recall, “I would always watch the director to see how he did things because it was my ambition even then to become a director. One of the directors in particular made fun of me when I would come up to him and say, ‘Excuse me, sir, don’t you think this shot would look better from over here?’ He would laugh and say, ‘Get lost!’” (Phillips: 6). A decade later, when he was directing the Vienna scene in These Three and an assistant came up to him with a suggestion for an alternative camera placement, Wyler was about to tell him off but then remembered his own early experience. He laughed and predicted the assistant would himself become a film director one day. The young assistant was Fred Zinnemann.

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Wyler had ten years of directing experience at Universal, a period traversing the transition from silent movies to the early days of sound. During that time he directed a total of no fewer than 40 films, comprising 21 two-reel silent westerns in Universal’s “Mustang” series, eight five-reel silent westerns in their “Blue Streak” series, and 11 features. One would not look to these films for evidence of personal expression so much as a growing mastery of his craft. For reasons of space, and my decision to concentrate on Wyler’s developing artistic maturity from 1936 onward, I have confined myself in the following pages to brief notes on some of the early sound films, which are representative of his work at this time, including The Gay Deception (1935), which he made for Twentieth Century–Fox after his departure from Universal and prior to his career-changing meeting with Sam Goldwyn. Unfortunately, I was not able to trace viewing copies of The Storm (1930), Her First Mate (1931), and Glamor (1934). The two-reelers were made in three days at a cost of $2000 each and the five-reelers were made in ten days at a cost of $20,000. In terms of narrative and psychology, Wyler would summarize the typical western as follows: if the plot included two men and a dog, the one who patted the animal could be quickly identified as the hero and the one who kicked it was the villain. These were not films that plumbed the depths of human complexity; and as Wyler’s 21 two-reelers were part of a series of 135 such shorts, it would have been difficult for him to make contributions that were distinctive and would attract critical attention. However, he was learning the mechanics of the camera, how to tell a story concisely, how to move the camera fluently and unobtrusively, and the infinite ways of showing how a hero gets on and off a horse. One of the shorts, Ridin’ for Love (1926), is notable as being the only film on which Wyler took a writing credit. Later to be immortalized as the love of King Kong’s life in the 1933 classic, the actress Fay Wray appeared in a couple of Wyler’s early films, in the two-reeler Don’t Shoot (1926) and the five-reeler Lazy Lightning (1926), before achieving stardom when cast in the leading role of Erich Von Stroheim’s The Wedding March (1928). The spectacular forest fire that concluded The Fire Barrier (1926) attracted critical praise, though some film historians have suggested that it might have been stock footage from some more ambitious feature; and The Ore Raiders (1927) was sometimes singled out for managing to pack as much action into two reels as some features managed in their entire length. Wyler’s own favorite of the “Mustang” series was Daze in the West (1927), a satire on the film industry scripted by a onetime member of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops, Billy Engle. It was Wyler’s first foray into comedy. Vin Moore, who played an egomaniacal director embarking on a new western, modeled his mannerisms and appearance on Cecil B. DeMille. Wyler played his assistant but was laughing so much at Moore’s impersonation during takes that the script was revised so that the assistant is fired.

The Shakedown (1929) Dave Roberts ( James Murray) is not what he seems. Admired by the small-town community of Fairfax, he rushes to the defense of a young woman who is being harassed by Battling Roff (George Kotsonaros), a professional fighter who tours the country challenging anyone to last four rounds in the ring with him. The camera tracks back as Dave marches towards the trouble and with a crowd swelling behind him, a shot that directly conveys both his purposefulness and his popularity. When he knocks Roff to the ground, the boxer’s manager, Deakin (Wheeler Oakman), intervenes and invites Dave to challenge Roff in the ring, and the crowd to lay odds on his victory. In the fight, however, Dave is knocked out. Cut to the manager counting his winnings and distributing the money, at which point Dave

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A Wonderful Heart

appears in the doorway to claim his share: the fight was a set-up. Deakin suggests that it’s time for Dave to move to another town and ingratiate himself with the community before Roff appears to engineer another bout. He can help the cause still further by saving someone’s life. Perhaps because the leading role is taken by James Murray, who was King Vidor’s unforgettable Everyman in his masterpiece The Crowd (1928), the revelation of Dave’s duplicity comes as quite a shock. Inevitably, when he develops a genuine attachment to a place and its people, as he does in his next town of Booneville, his conscience comes to the fore. Rather like classic boxing films such as Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul (1947) and Robert Wise’s The Set-Up (1949), everything will build to a climax in which the hero has to choose between purposely throwing the fight or attempting to win out of a sense of integrity and self-esteem. The final fight sequence is brutal, but there is little doubt of the outcome; and as Dave is carried off in triumph, we are not invited to reflect (as we are in the Rossen and Wise films) on the likely dangerous consequences of the hero’s double-crossing of his ruthless associates. To all intents and purposes, this was Wyler’s last silent film (although he was compelled to reshoot a couple of sequences after completion with dialogue added, to accommodate the increasing demand for sound). The core of the film is the developing relationship between Dave and a homeless boy, Clem ( Jack Hanlon), to whom he gives shelter and who comes to worship him. The relationship is handled without sentimentality. Even when he saves the boy’s life after Clem steals a pie and stumbles on a railway line, Dave’s initial reaction is disappointment that nobody has seen his heroism. It might, as his boss has suggested, have facilitated the forthcoming scam. The turning point comes when Dave punishes the boy for fighting when the latter has promised him always to count to ten before reacting to a provocation. We see this literally on the first occasion, as a countdown from ten is shown on the screen; but when someone says that Dave is an impostor, Clem’s countdown omits all the odd numbers and he storms at his adversary. When he creeps into the apartment later, Dave is waiting for him, a menacing figure in shadow with his back to the camera at the foreground of the frame. Clem refuses to explain why he has been fighting, at which point Dave threatens him with a belt, the low-angle shot from behind Dave’s hand showing both the weapon and the child’s fearful look at it (it anticipates a similar shot in Jezebel when the hero is planning to chastise the rebellious heroine). He hits the boy, who runs away crying; and it is only after the intervention of Dave’s sweetheart, Marjorie (Barbara Kent), that he learns the real reasons behind the boy’s bruises: they had been sustained in defending Dave’s name. It is an important motivational scene because Dave is doubly humiliated, having unjustly punished the boy but also having to acknowledge that the accusation is true. Because the scene is so emotionally charged and distressing (Dave’s abject and tearful apology to the boy is Chaplinesque in its intensity), it makes the hero’s change of heart dramatically credible. Rather as in Vittorio De Sica’s neo-realist classic, Bicycle Thieves (1948), the boy has become the hero’s conscience. For all the contrivances elsewhere and the improbably happy ending, that scene gives an early sign of Wyler’s exceptional skill with actors and his capacity to get the most out of a dramatic situation.

The Love Trap (1929) While he was preparing The Love Trap, Wyler received a note from his boss at Universal, Carl Laemmle, Jr., which read: “I am asking you to put your shoulder to the wheel and

ONE. Early Life and Films

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work harder than you ever have in your life. Thanks.” It is unlikely that Wyler would have needed such prompting, for he was aware that this film could prove something of a step up in his career. He was working with a bigger budget than before and with two popular stars of the day, Laura LaPlante and Neil Hamilton. He was also making a film that was negotiating the transition from the silent era to sound, with the last two reels being shot with spoken dialogue. The Love Trap is a minor work but worth dwelling on briefly because of its adumbration of future themes and stylistic characteristics but also to correct some errors that have crept into accounts of the film, even from some of Wyler’s most valuable commentators. (Both Kern and Herman get some narrative details wrong, for example, and Madsen’s summary covers only the first half of the film.) Almost in the manner of Funny Girl, the film begins when a hapless chorus girl, Evelyn Todd (Laura La Plante), is fired from her job. A sympathetic friend, who knows that Evelyn is also in difficulties over her rent, tells her of a party being hosted by a wealthy playboy, Guy Emory (Robert Ellis), where a girl can pick up $50 just by hanging around and looking pretty. At the party itself, however, Evelyn discovers that a girl is expected to do a lot more than that for the money; and when Emory slyly pours a drink over the back of her dress and then makes sexual advances while she changes out of her wet clothing, Evelyn is compelled to punch him on the nose and make a hasty exit, with only a bed quilt to put over her underclothes. Returning home, she finds her furniture has been thrown out into the street, and then suddenly the sky opens up with rain. Fortunately, a young businessman, Paul Harrington (Neil Hamilton), who is passing by in a cab, takes pity and summons a convoy of cabs to transport Evelyn and her furniture to where they need to go. During the journey, they fall in love, and later marry. Evelyn’s introduction to Paul’s wealthy family is a disaster. His mother (Clarissa Selwynne) is shocked at Evelyn’s chorus-girl background, and his sister, Iris (Rita La Roy), is openly contemptuous. When his uncle, Judge Harrington (Norman Trevor), arrives, the situation gets even worse, for the judge has been at Guy Emory’s party and seen Evelyn in what he has interpreted as a compromising situation with the host. The husband is momentarily disillusioned and leaves. The judge, for the sake of the family name, offers to buy off the heroine if she agrees to a quick divorce, but Evelyn turns the tables on him, deliberately setting fire to his jacket so that he has to remove his clothing. She then makes predatory advances to put him in the same compromising situation that Emory had contrived for her. The husband returns to catch them together, but will soon grasp the true situation. The judge leaves, humiliated; husband and wife are reconciled. Wyler’s direction makes the most of the modest material. The best visual joke is a composition-in-depth which was to become his trademark: as Evelyn and Paul snuggle up contentedly in the back of the cab, we see through the window behind them a convoy of exasperated cabbies dumping her furniture, in perfect unison, in the middle of the road. There is also one moment which, in retrospect, looks like quintessential Wyler, when Paul returns home with his mother and uncle, only to find Evelyn (through no fault of her own) in the throes of a party that she has not initiated. The shot of them as they stare across at each other from either side of the room conveys mutual social embarrassment at its most acute, with the camera position behind Evelyn emphasizing the space between them, which now looks vast — physically, emotionally, and socially. There is a critical consensus that says Wyler had no distinctive visual style, but you could recognize the hand of this director from that shot alone. The situation of rich man marrying showgirl is not exactly an original theme for roman-

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A Wonderful Heart

tic comedy, but The Love Trap is unusual in some respects and throws some surprises. Usually, the rich family is won over by the essential goodness and character of the other party, but this is certainly not the case here. The Harringtons remain unreconciled to their son at the end of the film, and indeed, given Evelyn’s diatribe against Mrs. Harrington and her humiliation of the uncle, it is difficult to see how any reconciliation would be possible. Jan Herman wrote that the uncle “finally realizes she’s not so bad after all” (87). On the contrary, given her deliberately provocative behavior toward him, the feeling is more that she has confirmed the suspicions he had formed of her character at Guy Emory’s party. Yet that raises another key question: what was the judge doing at Emory’s party in the first place? He could hardly claim a lack of awareness of the host’s character. Wyler’s indictment of the family is not so much for its snobbery, which is bad enough, but for its hypocrisy. The judge might recoil from Evelyn on the sofa when he visits them at their home but he was not so insensitive to her presence at the party. In fact, in addition to the scenes involving the judge (who, if not a seducer, is at best a voyeur), there is a revealing moment when Paul’s sister, Iris, refuses out of a sense of moral outrage to accompany her brother and their mother and uncle back to Paul’s home for a reconciliation with Evelyn. Iris then saunters slowly upstairs and the butler, once he has seen the rest of the family to their car, furtively follows her; the implication of her own dubious morality is unmistakable. As for Guy Emory, his unscrupulous nature is conveyed in a gesture. After Evelyn has fled from his failed seduction, he looks in the purse she has in her haste left behind and sees the $50 he has, against her protests, slipped inside. Without a second thought he takes it out and slips it back into his own pocket. Wyler really does not like the undeserving rich and, beneath the romantic comedy surface, there is in embryo the themes of class, social disparity, and moral hypocrisy that are to be a consistent leitmotif in his later work.

Hell’s Heroes (1930) An outlaw bursts into a church service on Christmas morning carrying a newborn babe. As he staggers down the aisle, the screen falls silent. We momentarily think this signifies the shock of the congregation at this abrupt entrance, but then, in a point of view shot, we see the preacher’s lips still moving and we realize we have been taken into the outlaw’s perspective at the moment before his death. Basil Wright thought this was one of the most effective uses of sound — and silence — since the recent advent of the talkies (Wright: 72). This is the final scene of Hell’s Heroes. The film was based on Peter B. Kyne’s novel, Three Godfathers, which had already been filmed twice before — in 1916, and by John Ford in 1919 as Marked Men— and was to be filmed again in 1936 by Richard Bieslawski and by John Ford yet again in 1948. (Thereafter it became something of a running joke between the two men, Ford frequently reminding Wyler that it was now his turn to remake Three Godfathers.) The plot concerns three outlaws who, having robbed the bank in a town called New Jerusalem, escape into the desert where a sandstorm affords protection from a fleeing posse but also, after they have taken shelter, allows their horses to escape. Searching for water, they come across a wagon in which a dying woman is about to give birth to a baby boy, whose father, they learn, was the bank cashier they had shot and killed during their robbery. With her dying breath, the woman exacts a promise from them all that they become godfathers to their son and return him to safety in New Jerusalem. This is, then, a sentimental and ironic retelling of the biblical story of the Three Wise Men, recast and transplanted into the harsh landscape of the American West.

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Peter Kyne disliked Wyler’s version of his tale, almost certainly because it is the harshest and least sentimental. The desert scenes were shot near Death Valley, where the famous final scenes of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) were shot, and the emphasis is less on religious redemption than harsh realism. A saloon scene is sleazily atmospheric. Charles Bickford’s bandit swaggers boorishly at the bar as he awaits the arrival of his three fellow outlaws, and has no difficulty in intimidating the town sheriff, who seems more interested in leering at the saloon dancer than anticipating a bank robbery. When the outlaws escape with the money, one of them will be shot in the back without compunction by the town preacher. Originally, Wyler planned an ending where the returning outlaw was to be lynched by the townspeople before they realized he had saved a baby’s life, and although this was toned down, the ending is still bleak, and the only film version of the tale in which all three of the godfathers are dead at the end. When the three men come across the dying woman (Fritzi Ridgeway) in the wagon, Bickford’s villain insists, “I saw her first.” There is no doubt what initially he has in mind (his rough treatment of the saloon girl indicates the usual way he treats women). When he is asked after the birth of the child what they should do with it, he replies, “See how far you can throw it.” As his partners drop away one by one (the wounded Barbwire shoots himself and Bill wanders off to die when he realizes there is not enough water for three), Bickford shouts at the baby, “All on account of you, you little brat!” At this point he is ready to leave the baby to die — and a desert lizard closes in stealthily for the kill — but he goes back for it and will later drink poisoned water to keep going, an action that will save the baby’s life but is mainly a fatalistic recognition that there is now no way in which he can save his own. The performances of Bickford, Raymond Hatton (Barbwire), and Fred Kohler (Bill) are all strong, and the photography undoubtedly looks authentic — to the point where the cameraman, George Robinson, was sometimes passing out with the heat. What caught the attention of the critics, though, was the imaginative quality of the direction. When Bickford’s outlaw sizes up the bank from the outside prior to the robbery, there is a spectacular pointof-view panning shot as he looks across at the hills in the far distance and sees his three companions at the top of the ridge — perhaps a pre-sentiment of Wyler’s liking for deepfocus, and a shot that anticipates by nearly thirty years a similar visual effect in The Big Country (when Gregory Peck takes his leave of Jean Simmons at the schoolhouse and in the far distance we see three horsemen appearing menacingly at the top of a hill, prior to their kidnapping of the schoolteacher). During the robbery, one of the outlaws Jose ( Jose de la Cruz) is posted as lookout outside the bank and crosses himself uneasily as a hearse drives past behind him; it will be a premonition of his death during the escape. (There is a typical piece of humor also because, when the shooting starts, we see the hearse hurtling back into town, the driver obviously having a nose for business.) Above all, there is a remarkable, meandering tracking shot of Bickford’s footprints as he zigzags deliriously across the desert. It was a shot that drew praise for Wyler as a director to watch from Darryl Zanuck, as a particularly striking camera movement at a time when early talkies tended to be a little static. Ironically, it was a visual strategy necessitated by Bickford’s refusal to play the scene in the way that Wyler wanted and the director’s having to find another way of capturing the character’s desperation. (The story goes that Bickford gave Wyler a hard time on this film and the director exacted full revenge when the two were to work together again three decades later in The Big Country.) As the townspeople are gathered in the church, we are given a long shot of Bickford as he staggers down the deserted

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street. A shot of him from inside the window of the bank becomes an ironic comment on his fate. And so to the remarkable final scene. Wyler’s earlier experience in silent westerns is clearly evident here, but his more complex characterization of ostensible villains who display other sides to their character looks ahead to future characterizations. And with a fair amount of cinematic virtuosity thrown in, too, this was the first film to secure recognition of Wyler as an exceptionally promising director.

A House Divided (1931) Against her better judgment, a young Bette Davis was encouraged to audition for the leading female role in this picture wearing what she thought was an inappropriately revealing dress. To her acute discomfort, this drew a withering comment from Wyler about actresses trying to land roles for their physical attributes (this is probably a polite paraphrase of what he actually said). Some years later, when she learned Wyler was to be her director on Jezebel and anticipating storms ahead, Davis reminded him of this first meeting and, according to her account, he had the good grace to turn positively green with embarrassment and apologize profusely. This was a prelude to one of the most celebrated actor/director partnerships of the classic Hollywood era. Still, it is interesting to speculate on the impact it might have had on her career if she had landed the role, for this is Wyler’s most intense and innovative drama prior to his association with Sam Goldwyn. The part eventually went to that fine actress Helen Chandler, probably best known to moviegoers as Mina Seward, one of the victims of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula (though some film lovers would also cherish her remarkable performance as the strange heroine of William Dierterle’s classic “Lost Generation” film, The Last Flight, 1931). In A House Divided, Chandler plays a mail-order bride, Ruth Evans who arrives at a small fishing village to marry a widower, Seth Law (Walter Huston). From the letter, she has formed the impression of quite a sensitive and gentle man, but in fact it has been written by Seth’s son, Matt (Kent Douglass), who has composed it as enticingly as possible in the hope that the arrival of a new wife for his father will facilitate his own departure from a house and a community he hates. Ruth has actually arrived as a replacement for the letter’s original recipient, who in the interim has married someone else. These complications take on a more serious dimension when Ruth finds herself fearful of Seth but secretly drawn to Matt. The tale develops into a powerful enactment of sexual rivalry between father and son, directed with what the critic of the Boston Herald (December 14, 1931) called a “strong suggestiveness of the imaginative qualities of F. W. Murnau” (Madsen: 79). Initially scripted by John B. Clyman and Dale Van Every from an Olive Edens short story entitled “Heart and Hand,” the screenplay had been given an extra polish by Walter Huston’s son, John, who was establishing a reputation as one of America’s most promising young writers. He recognized the influence on the material of Eugene O’Neill’s play, Desire Under the Elms, and sought to remove as far as possible the melodramatic elements he perceived in the screenplay. “I saw how the script could be improved,” he was to write later, “by bringing the dialogue down to an absolute minimum, making the characters seem inarticulate” (Huston: 57). Wyler liked his suggestions and it was the beginning of a lasting friendship and a deep mutual professional admiration between the two men. A House Divided begins with a death and will end with one. An atmospheric opening long shot shows characters dressed in mourning proceeding slowly across a beach and forming black silhouettes against a gray sky. A coffin that has been ferried across by boat is unfastened

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and carried to its resting place by the husband and son of the dead woman. The contrast between the two men is established immediately. The son is obviously distressed and, in his grief, unable to carry the coffin further; the father is tough and unsentimental and carries it the remaining distance on his own. A few words are spoken by a preacher before the brief service is concluded. In what Wyler was later to call an “arty” touch, microphones were placed inside the coffin and pebbles rather than earth were tossed on the lid to emphasize the dramatic effect of the moment when both men, leaving the funeral, look back at the sound of the coffin as it is lowered into the ground and are reminded of what they have lost. The contrast between father and son is accentuated still further in the next sequence. Seth strides along while Matt slouches behind with his head lowered in sadness. Walter Huston’s galvanized physical movement generates much of the film’s narrative momentum. He orders his son to raise his head, speaking in the imperative tense — peremptory statements that brook no argument. To Matt’s horror, Seth’s way of dealing with his wife’s death is a visit to the nearest saloon. In a remarkably sustained sequence, Seth proceeds to drink, dance, and flirt, brusquely sweeping aside any expressions of condolence. It is a defiant assertion of his own continuing vigor and vitality, though viewed by his son as evidence of the man’s brutishness and insensitivity. All of this is confirmed when Seth involves himself in a wrestling match, which he wins and celebrates by treating all to a drink. (In a typical piece of Wyler comic counterpoint, a drunken cripple has slept through the brawl but wakes up at the call of free drinks, staggers to the bar with his wooden leg and, noticing the wreckage caused by the wrestling, picks up a broken table-leg for possible future use.) When Seth tries to involve his son in the celebrations, however, the son’s hatred erupts and a violent argument ensues. This is strikingly shot by Wyler with the two locked in enmity in total shadow at the foreground of the frame while the saloon crowd in the background forms a line to look on in fascination and horror — an early example of the composition-in-depth shot for which Wyler would later become renowned. The father knocks his son unconscious and in a terse panning shot, Wyler’s camera follows Seth as he carries out his boy in silence from the saloon — the second member of his family whom he has carried on his back that day and an image that implies his destructive effect on his family. Two weeks have passed since his mother’s burial and Matt has joined Seth on his fishing expeditions, but seems a harbinger of bad fortune. (“He hasn’t had a good catch since he’s taken that boy with him,” a fisherman observes.) On their return home, the maid gives notice, finding the work too much and Seth insufferable, and giving a clear hint that it was the hardness of her life with Seth that had led to the premature death of his wife. Wyler cuts to a shot of the sea, which will become a recurrent motif, not only a correlative to the emotional turbulence in the house but a portent of where the drama will climax. Reading the magazine Heart and Hand and laughing scornfully at its contents, Seth conceives the idea of a mail-order bride to do the cooking and housework, and he selects one from the advertisements. His utter lack of sentiment about the proposal is conveyed by his handing over the letter-writing chore to Matt while he plays with their dog, and by his complete indifference to any suggestion of a change to his routine on the morning of her scheduled arrival. In a superbly shot and acted scene around the breakfast table, concise and seemingly spontaneous (which invariably means painstaking directorial preparation), Seth’s conversation consists of little more than “Salt” “More coffee” and “Shut up” as Matt panders to his every whim while reminding him of his promise: If the mail-order bride is acceptable, Matt can leave. When Seth has gone, Matt busies himself around the house trying to make it

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look as presentable as possible. Even after he has exited one room, we see his hand reach back hastily inside as an afterthought to straighten a picture on the wall. Ruth Evans’s arrival will prove to be a shock to all three of the main characters. She is younger than expected and not the woman in the picture. Her initial assumption that Matt is her future husband will be dispelled, to her evident disappointment, as the two seem to have hit it off immediately and find they have much in common. As they converse with increasing warmth, the inserted overhead shot of Seth returning from his day’s fishing and nearing the harbor registers as an uncomfortable intrusion. His arrival at the house will abruptly raise the level of tension in the household. Ruth’s first meeting with Seth is finely done. The dog suddenly rushes out of the door anticipating his return; we hear a disconcertingly harsh, savage laugh, very different in tone from the gentle conversation she has shared with Matt; and then suddenly, with one gangling stride, Seth is before her and a looming presence in the center of the room, wondering who she is and saying to her bluntly, “No, you won’t do.” It is no surprise that her initial response to Seth is one of abject fear; and it is a feeling that will never leave her. When it is too late for her to begin the journey back home that evening, Matt invites her to stay with them for dinner; and after questioning her, Seth declares, “All right, I’ll marry you,” and determines to go ahead with the ceremony that very night. “See, I told you everything’d be all right,” Matt tells her, but Ruth repeats, “I’m afraid of him ...” and climbs the stairs to change into her wedding dress, seemingly in a trance, as if in a nightmare from which she might soon awaken. In the meantime, Seth lowers the lamp to look at his family tree. Another entry is about to be made, and there may soon be more. Deliberately, one feels, Wyler films the wedding sequence in a manner that recalls the earlier saloon scene. There is a similar raucousness and outward displays of drunken glee. Seth again relishes being the center of attention, singing a drinking song and doing a wild dance, both solo and with his new bride, who still seems utterly dazed by the speed of the passage of events and by the physicality of the older man. (“Hold her tight, Seth!” shouts a musician, played by a young Walter Brennan.) Yet the sequence, like that in the saloon, is also visually gloomy, as if a sense of palpable dread hangs over the whole proceedings. A panning shot across the revelers as they pass the rising flames of a fire is more evocative of a lynch mob than of guests at a wedding. Also, as in the earlier sequence, the prevailing mood of rowdy abandon is pointedly set against the apprehension and disquiet of one member of the party, whose worst fears are realized by this display. The marriage goes ahead in a service as perfunctory and portentous as that of the funeral at the beginning of the film. “Go on, kiss her,” says Seth to Matt at the end of the service, ‘it’s your new ma.” Unwittingly, he is spelling out the emotional triangle about to develop. The wedding night is traumatic, blending Oedipal jealousy with the threat of marital rape. When Seth moves toward Ruth, the camera tracks behind him in a way that emphasizes the man’s menacing presence and his forceful intrusion into Ruth’s space. When he begins to take the ribbon from her hair, her anxiety comes to the surface and she begs to be let alone and to be allowed to go home. “I’m afraid, Mr. Laws,” she says. “I’ll kill myself.” When Matt attempts to intervene on her behalf, he is told by his father to “shut your mouth.” The action has shifted to the stairs that lead to the bedroom, an early example of Wyler’s use of staircases for expressive and dramatic effect. The bride has been ordered to the bedroom. Deaf to Matt’s pleading, Seth tells him, pointedly “Maybe she’ll give me a son ... a son that’ll grow up to be a man,” before ascending the staircase after her. (The theme of masculinity will become a recurring motif in Wyler’s films, as, through his heroes,

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he consistently questions conventional notions of screen heroism.) We see Matt’s hand clenched in tension on the banister as he looks up to the bedroom in silent anguish. Suddenly, he bounds up the stairs and bars his father from entrance to the marital bedroom. The sexual conflict is now out in the open, and with startling, symbolic directness. A furious fight ensues on the landing. We know that, in terms of strength, the son is no match for the father, but Seth literally brings about his own downfall, overreaching when throwing a missed punch and falling spectacularly over the balcony rail to the bottom of the stairs. The fall will leave him temporarily paralyzed. “You’ll be sorry you didn’t finish the job,” Seth bitterly says to his son after a doctor tells him he may never walk again. Several weeks have passed and Matt has stayed behind out of a sense of guilt. Ruth has stayed also. “I’m his wife, aren’t I?” she says by way of explanation, but the question mark seems to suggest a deeper motive. Later, when she is looking at the ocean, she wishes silently upon a star and puts her fingers on Matt’s lips. He does the same, and is about to tell her what he wished. The delicate physical contact silences him but is enough to suggest what that wish might been: a forbidden temptation, an impossible love. But as Matt and Ruth grow ever closer, Seth seems to regain his strength. When he declares that he can now move his toes, the look shared between Matt and Ruth is one of horror. The tension in the household finally explodes one night as a storm rages outside. While Matt secures the boats against the wind, Seth tells Ruth to come to him. His words to her, “I’ve waited so long for what’s mine,” are heard against a crack of thunder. There seems little doubt about the sexual implication, nor the sense of dread they instill in Ruth. When Matt returns, a reverse angle shot significantly positions Matt between the reclining Seth and the object of desire, Ruth. As the two young people return to their rooms upstairs, Seth watches them with a new suspicion. Night falls, and the storm continues to rage, a correlative to Seth’s frustration and torment as he broods in the darkness. Wyler cuts to a shot of Ruth looking out as the rain lashes her window: A flash of lightning seems to emphasize her terror but it is clear that more than just the storm is making her afraid. Matt, too, stares out of his window. Ruth leaves her room to join him and tell him of her fear. “I’m afraid, I’m afraid,” she repeats, to which Matt replies, “If he touched you, I’d kill him.” But, in a scene of gathering suspense, Wyler crosscuts this whispered conversation with shots of Seth crawling along the floor and up the stairs like a malevolent crab. When he sees Ruth’s open door and a light under Matt’s, his worst imaginings are confirmed. Wyler gives us a low-angle point-of-view shot as he pushes the door open and sees the two together sitting on the bed. Another furious fight ensues. Ruth escapes to wait for Matt in one of the boats, but it comes adrift in the storm. David Shipman said about this scene that “there has never been a more terrifying storm than the one that forms the climax of this film” (Shipman, Volume 1: 273). Father and son both go after the boat. Matt swims to Ruth’s rescue, only to find afterwards that his father, who has tethered himself to the boat for safety, drowned when the boat capsized. “A Good Cast Worth Repeating” say the end titles in the manner of the time, and the cast is indeed exceptional, with Helen Chandler utilizing her uniquely sad voice to sustain a constant, tremulous anxiety in her performance as Ruth, while Kent Douglass (later to change his screen name to Douglass Montgomery) gives an equally sensitive performance of a decent and courageous character often out of his depth. The outstanding performance, though, is that of Walter Huston, his most fearsome patriarch prior to his role in Anthony Mann’s The Furies (1950), and an intimidating and overwhelming presence throughout the film. From this, one can imagine him as a magnificent Captain Ahab. A House Divided was a tough film to make. Wyler went over schedule and over budget,

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much to the displeasure of the studio head, Carl Laemmle Jr., who objected to Wyler’s coverage of scenes from so many different angles. Released in December 1931 and hardly seeming like Christmas fare, the film was not a commercial success in America, though it did acquire a following in France ( John Huston was to recall that the film ran for two years in a little movie theatre on the Left Bank in Paris), and was a harbinger of the admiration of the French for Wyler’s work. For David Shipman, it was the film “that established Wyler’s mastery” (ibid: 273). In just 70 minutes he creates a human drama that never lets up in its drive toward tragedy and redemption. One cannot help but be swept along by it.

Tom Brown of Culver (1932) Midway through this film there is a scene that turns the preceding narrative upsidedown. Until then, the story has concerned a reluctant Army cadet Tom Brown (played by an actor of the same name) who is subsidized by the American Legion because his dead father was a war hero and Congressional Medal of Honor winner. Suddenly, we learn that Brown’s father is neither dead nor a hero. The revelation is disclosed in a cleverly conceived scene at Slim’s Canteen, where the owner, Slim (Slim Summerville), who habitually regales his customers with tales of his wartime experience, is for once upstaged by the wit of one of one of his customers. “Say, who are you?” demands Slim, to which the customer replies, “I’ve often wondered ...” before departing. It is a comically oblique introduction to the most dramatic revelation in the film, and catches an audience slightly off-guard. Yet that question of identity is an appropriate lead-in to the moment when Slim slowly recognizes the remaining stranger at the counter as Doc Brown (H. B. Warner), a revered war comrade whom Slim thought had died but who now reveals that, severely shell-shocked during a raid, he had deserted and stolen a dead man’s identity (stealing a name-tag that was trailing from a disembodied arm). Doc has come to inquire about his son before disappearing again, but when it becomes clear he is too ill to leave, Slim ensures he has a bed in a veterans’ hospital. From here, the film proceeds along predictable lines, with the father eventually revealing his identity to his son and, in recognition of his courage before his breakdown, being given an honorable discharge by the Army. At the same time, while extolling the virtues and camaraderie of military life, the film also indicates, through Doc Brown’s breakdown and his near-suicidal despair, the horrors as well as the heroics of war. H. B. Warner’s performance, particularly in his panic during a thunderstorm that recalls the sound of gunfire and explosions, is a very powerful rendition of a sensitive man whose mind has been torn asunder by the dreadful things he has witnessed. Wyler’s main recollection of Tom Brown of Culver was the unusual opportunity to shoot the exterior scenes on location at Culver Military Academy. This seemed part of his strategy to inject a little realism in the midst of the idealism. There is a humorous moment of disillusionment when Tom’s roommate (Richard Cromwell, who was later to play Henry Fonda’s brother in Jezebel) goes absent without leave to see his movie idol Dolores Delight, only to be mistaken for a delivery boy and summarily dismissed when he goes backstage to present Dolores with a bouquet of flowers. During his research, Wyler had observed some bullying of the younger cadets by their seniors; this is briefly alluded to in a scene in a shower and in another scene, where the young cadets are put through a punishing routine of extra drill because of Brown’s slackness. Before he has started as a cadet, he is soundly beaten in a boxing match that recalls the brutal boxing scenes in The Shakedown, and offers

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a vignette of the toughness of life during the Depression, as well as the young man’s defeatist and even masochistic approach to life after the death of his mother and (he thinks) his father. The Academy will change all that, of course. Tom Brown is slickly made and has a strong cast that includes a young Tyrone Power (making his screen debut as one of the cadets) and an uncredited Eugene Pallette, who listens with seemingly infinite patience to Slim’s oft-repeated tales of war before explaining in that unmistakable, gravelly voice, “I’m stone deef.” The material remains simplistic and patriotic but, in retrospect, there is a certain irony in its introductory dedication to “the future defenders of our nation in peace and war.” In ten years’ time, Wyler himself became one of those “defenders of our nation,” and played an active role in the war against Fascism in Europe. And incidentally, the film was to be remade in 1939 as Spirit of Culver, starring Jackie Cooper as Tom Brown, and co-scripted by Nathanael West who, at the same time, was hard at work on one of the most scathing portrayals of Hollywood ever written, his classic novel, The Day of the Locust. Dolores Delight’s curt dismissal of a fan at her stagedoor in the Wyler film is very much in that spirit of Hollywood disenchantment.

Counsellor at Law (1933) George Simon ( John Barrymore) is a successful lawyer in New York, having risen to the top of his profession (the 27th floor, in fact) from an impoverished Jewish upbringing. However, a rival is threatening him with disbarment for unprofessional conduct earlier in his career, when Simon falsified an alibi for a young man ( John Qualen) in order to save him from a lengthy confinement in prison. The pressure on him is intensified by the lack of support from his socialite wife, Cora (Doris Kenyon), who fears the scandal such revelations will bring. Although Simon effectively counters the accusation by discovering some unsavory scandal about his rival’s private life, his joy is short-lived when he learns that his wife has departed on a European cruise with another man (Melvyn Douglas). Simon is recued from committing suicide by his loyal secretary, Regina Gordon (Bebe Daniels), who is secretly in love with him. Based on Elmer Rice’s 1931 theatrical hit (it ran for 397 performances on Broadway) and adapted for the screen by the playwright, Counsellor at Law was Wyler’s most prestigious and acclaimed film at Universal, and to this day is regarded as one of the best films ever made about the legal profession. Aside from the quality of the material, the chief attraction for Wyler was the opportunity to work with an actor of the caliber of John Barrymore. The part had been played on stage by Paul Muni, who did not wish to repeat the role on film for fear of being typecast in Jewish roles. (He was anyway about to rocket to screen stardom for his performances in Howard Hawks’s Scarface in 1932 and Mervyn LeRoy’s I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang in 1933.) The collaboration with Barrymore was not all plain sailing by any means. The actor had difficulty remembering his lines — in fairness, delivering legal jargon at breakneck speed, as was the fashion of the time, was not the easiest of acting assignments — and the number of takes required to nail down one scene Barrymore shared with John Qualen is often thought to be the origin of Wyler’s nickname of “50-Take Wyler.” Nevertheless, Barrymore gave what is widely regarded as his finest screen performance, and the one that best revealed his stature as an actor. Wyler particularly appreciated his ability to find unexpected humor in some of the lines, and Barrymore also is very deft at disclosing the occasional insecurity lurking beneath Simon’s self-confident façade, particularly in the scenes with his wife.

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In addition to an exceptionally strong supporting cast that included Bebe Daniels (her angry swipe at the wife’s portrait on Simon’s desk says all that needs to be said of where her loyalties lie), Thelma Todd (as a grasping client), and a scene-stealing turn by Isabel Jewell as the telephone operator, there are striking performances by two young men who were to become accomplished directors in their own right: Vincent Sherman, as the doomed anarchist who vehemently reminds Simon of his roots and social passion before the trappings of power and prestige take precedence over principles; and Richard Quine, as Simon’s snobbish stepson, representative of a society Simon both covets and despises. When the two are waiting outside Simon’s office and the stepson makes contemptuous reference to “some errand boy,” a shot from behind Sherman’s back shows the young agitator rising to his feet, looking like a black column of righteous indignation on the left of the frame. The stepson is intimidated, and stops speaking — as well he might: for the anarchist looks as if he could kill him. It is a very powerful moment, particularly if one sees these characters as two indicators of Simon’s character in his youth. The anarchist’s angry rise to his feet is like the surfacing of Simon’s guilty subconscious. By confining the action to a back room, a front office, a secretary’s office, and an elevator lobby, Wyler preserves the play’s tight structure. In fact, he even restored some parts of the text Rice was planning to jettison for the screen. He resisted front-office pressure to open out the play to include some exterior action (such as the investigation of the private affairs of Simon’s accuser), feeling that this would lead to a loss of tension and concentration. Wyler’s concept of “opening up” a play had less to do with exterior location and more to do with the use and movement of the camera to enhance visual interest and detail in a manner impossible in the theater, and thus to heighten the inherent drama. Two powerful examples of that occur when Simon is at his lowest ebb. The telephone operator has been talking of seeing a man commit suicide by plunging to his death from a high building, at which point Wyler cuts to a shot of Simon alone in his office and fearing his career is in ruins. The camera moves slowly toward his back, and as he swivels in his chair, Wyler cuts to a reverse angle to show Simon in close-up, staring toward his window and seemingly contemplating the same fate. That career crisis is averted, but then an equally devastating personal one occurs when Simon, now in the main office at the switchboard, realizes his wife has left him. Thinking the office is now deserted, he switches off the light. As before, the camera moves toward his back, but, with the room in darkness, the mood is even gloomier. This time he stands and walks toward the window. At this point, Wyler cuts to a shot of him from outside the window, which permits us to hear the faint sound of life rising from the city below. The shot takes us by surprise as it is the first time the camera has gone outside the office. It suddenly brings home the claustrophobia of the proceedings until then; the faintness of the sound conveys the height of the impending fall but it is also a reminder of life going on. As Simon lifts the window frame, there is a scream behind him — the secretary has not left and her reaction pulls him up short. Lighting, performance, camera placement, close-up and the use of sound all combine to give tingling suspense to a moment when the hero very nearly gives in to despair. Of all of Wyler’s early films before Goldwyn, this is the one that is probably the most highly regarded. Wyler was bold enough to dispense with a background score, and the film’s fluency is aided by the editing of Daniel Mandell, a first-time collaborator who was to edit most of Wyler’s major films, up to and including The Best Years of Our Lives. Besides being the first film that showed Wyler’s flair for filming theatrical material, Counsellor at Law also has certain themes — notably those of unrequited love and antagonism between social

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classes — that Wyler frequently returned to in later films. Although not a box-office success, the film had two endorsements that Wyler was to treasure. The first was a telegram to Wyler dated November 27, 1932, from Elmer Rice, who described the film as “excellent in all its details and you have every reason to be proud of the fine job you have done.” The second was less direct but equally important. The film had been seen and admired by Lillian Hellman, and when Wyler was proposed as a director for These Three, she was delighted. Their collaboration was to lead to a lifetime friendship and one of the most important of Wyler’s cinematic partnerships.

The Good Fairy (1935) The Good Fairy was to be Wyler’s last film for Universal and united him — in more than one sense — with one of the rising stars of the day, Margaret Sullavan. Many years later, Wyler was to tell Sullavan’s daughter, Brooke Hayward, that he and Sullavan had clashed at the beginning of the shooting, until he noticed that in some close-ups she looked terrible and in others she looked great. She had been told by cameraman Norbert Brodine that her appearance depended on whether or not she and Wyler had been arguing. Resolving for the benefit of his film to be nicer to the heroine, he began dating Sullavan and a whirlwind romance developed, culminating in marriage in November 1934 — and divorce less than a year later. Asked about Sullavan in his final interview for his daughter Catherine’s documentary on him, Wyler said: “Her special gift was being very attractive and also she was a good little actress” (Miller: 140). With her distinctive husky voice, exquisite comedy timing and a face that irradiated the screen, she also had the capacity to make critics go weak at the knees if not in the head. Writing about The Good Fairy, the normally level-headed Otis Ferguson enthused that Sullavan was “entirely lovely and if she isn’t an actress I wouldn’t know it; that is the way things are between Margaret Sullavan and me” (cited in Sarris: 412). In “So Red the Rose, However You Spell It,” Ogden Nash was moved to poetry in musing on this phenomenon. Wondering about the unusual spelling of the name of this “bewitching dame,” he concluded that, whatever the reason, “Sullavan with an A” was still the “fairest of sights in twinkling lights” (Hayward: 162). Nash’s enchantment with her was to be echoed by other critics, such as Parker Tyler, who was to extol her voice as “husky with human sympathy” (Sarris: 414), and Andrew Sarris, who was to refer to what he called the “emotional iridescence” of her face, voice, movements and gestures (ibid). She was to make only 16 films in her relatively short-lived screen career, and her stardom had been waning some time before her death (at the age of 49) in 1960, but the poise and poignancy of her screen persona can still come through powerfully in her best roles, notably in her moving performances in Three Comrades (1938) and The Mortal Storm (1940) by that master of romantic melodrama, Frank Borzage, and in her comedies. Certainly The Good Fairy is as good an introduction to the Sullavan magic as any: if you are not bewitched by her here, it is unlikely that you will be elsewhere (though her finest comedy performance on film will come five years later in The Shop Around the Corner by Wyler’s comedy mentor, Ernst Lubitsch). Commenting on The Good Fairy, David Shipman thought that “in no other film does she so well demonstrate her ability to find that point at which she could express her own personality or star quality while still offering maximum fidelity both to the script and to the rules of human behavior” (Volume 1: 425). Even

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when suggesting that the number of close-ups she was given actually slowed the momentum of the picture, Variety (February 5, 1935) had to concede they were “so beautiful that they seem worthwhile.” Sullavan plays the good fairy of the title, a role that been a modest hit for Helen Hayes when the play had run on Broadway in 1931. The heroine is an orphan girl in Budapest called Luisa Ginglebusher who is offered a job as a cinema usherette and obtains leave on the understanding that she will endeavor to do a good deed every day. Her innocence will change the lives of three men who cross her path. They are a waiter, Detlaff (Reginald Owen), who has encountered her in the cinema and who resolves both to introduce her to high society and protect her from harm; a millionaire, Konrad (Frank Morgan), who is instantly smitten and, in the mistaken belief that she is married, promises as a favor to her a well-paid post in his business for her husband to promote his career; and a lawyer, Max Sporum (Herbert Marshall), whose name Luisa selects from a phone book and who will be the unsuspecting beneficiary of Konrad’s munificence and Luisa’s “good fairy” intentions. The subsequent complications, misapprehensions and deceptions that ensue are the stuff of good and genial comedy, and here the strengths of the main artists involved interact in an interesting way. Freely adapted from a play by Ferenc Molnar, the screenplay was by Preston Sturges, soon to become Hollywood’s foremost writer-director and, as Wyler insisted, a genuine auteur. In this film we have some of the trademarks of his future work, particularly that extraordinary run of eight comedies he wrote and directed between 1940 and 1944: his delight in strange names (not only Sullavan’s Ginglebusher but Alan Hale’s Schlapkohl, the cinema owner) that cause other characters such difficulty in remembering or enunciating and might indicate a slipperiness of identity; and his love of raucous antagonistic comedy conducted at top speed and maximum volume (here between the millionaire trying to ingratiate himself with Luisa and the waiter trying to protect her). A film-within-a film will anticipate the opening of Sullivan’s Travels (1941), where here both waiter and usherette are moved to tears by a drawing-room melodrama in which the hero simply repeats the word “Go!” to the pleading heroine. Two character types here will recur in Sturges: the millionaire with more money than sense, and who might be rich but is still emotionally unfulfilled (see The Palm Beach Story); and the principled poor man who comes into unexpected riches (rather like Dick Powell’s disgruntled slogan-writer in Christmas in July) and wonders with some justification what he can have done to deserve it. (Herbert Marshall as the ethical lawyer has a particularly touching scene after he has learned of the transformation of his fortunes and starts musing about new office furniture and a cherished state-of-the-art pencil sharpener, before suddenly realizing he is talking to himself, wondering if he has dreamt it all.) And there are some typically sharp lines. When Cesar Romero, attempting a stagedoor pick-up, says to one of the girls, “Looking for a gentleman?” he receives the tart reply, “Do you know where I can find one?” When the millionaire offers a lucrative job to the dumbstruck lawyer, he says, “I’m looking for an honest man — if possible, with brains.” The sting of that “if possible” is pure Sturges. Sturges was to be one of the great proponents of Hollywood screwball comedy, which was just coming into its own as a distinctive sub-genre after the success of Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934). Moreover, as Ed Sikov noted, although Sturges went some way to bringing an American vernacular to Molnar’s play, The Good Fairy is “still too Europeanminded to be truly screwball” (Sikov : 118). Wyler’s comedies will nearly all be set in Europe — even The Gay Deception, although set mainly in New York, has a Europeanized

ONE. Early Life and Films

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hero — and his comedy model would seem to be the gentler, more contemplative sophistication of a Lubitsch than the later madcap Hollywood romantic comedies of the late ’30s and early ’40s. Characteristically, he will confront the privileged with the underprivileged and make fun of the awkwardness on both sides when the two come into contact. “Your cloak, madam,” says the doorman to Luisa, offering to take her garment as she prepares to enter the wealthy party (to which she has been invited). She replies, surprised and slightly affronted, “Why, certainly it’s my cloak!,” completely misreading his meaning. Rather than the escalating chaos that characterizes developments in screwball comedy, the humor here comes more from observation of behavioral tics or minor visual incongruity, like the moment when Luisa’s hat is knocked slightly awry as she hides in a doorway; or the lawyer’s quick combing of his scruffy beard when he is nervous; or, after his elaborate arrangements for Luisa’s arrival, Konrad’s tripping over a lamp in his excitement to answer the door; or Luisa’s trying on an inexpensive piece of fur in a shop (“But Meredith ...” she says, in playful imitation of the anguished heroine of the film she was watching earlier), her reflection infinitely duplicated in a multiple mirror shot that pokes fun at the moment’s fake romanticism. In the end, there might be too many individual voices for a unified comedy, but the diversity of talent makes for an engaging entertainment. A curious critical footnote. In 1972, Andrew Sarris, who, as we have seen, had savaged Wyler’s reputation in the 1960s, briefly discussed The Good Fairy in an essay on Preston Sturges and talked of “Wyler’s strenuous misdirection of delicate comedy” and “the miscasting of Herbert Marshall as the lawyer-lover” (Corliss: 101). But when Sarris discussed the film in 1998, the tone was markedly different, and the film was notable for “Wyler’s graceful [my italics] direction of delicate comedy” and “the off beat casting of Herbert Marshall” (Sarris: 314). Sarris had commendably mellowed over the years.

The Gay Deception (1935) “It is a kind of a fairy-tale, a Cinderella story,” said Wyler in a 1967 interview with Curtis Hanson about The Gay Deception (cited in Miller: 26). Made for Twentieth Century–Fox after Wyler had ended his contract at Universal, it is a little-known and slight romantic comedy that was to play an inordinately significant role in shaping Wyler’s future career. Small-town stenographer Mirabel Miller (Frances Dee) wins the Casabah County Sweepstake and, forsaking the cautious advice of her stuffy bank manager, decides to blow it all on a month’s stay at the luxurious Walsdorf Plaza hotel (to all intents and purposes, the Waldorf Astoria) in New York. Assuming from her reservation that she must be a rich society lady, the hotel management pulls out all the stops on her behalf, displayed via a majestic panning shot across the hotel lobby showing a veritable patrol of bellboys marching behind her and carrying her luggage to her room before depositing everything with choreographed military precision. However, one of them, Sandro (Francis Lederer), known only to his employers and fellow-workers as “Number 14,” has quickly seen through her façade, probably because he is in disguise himself, being in actuality the Prince of Allesandro, covertly learning the hotel business from the inside and checking out the Walsdorf Plaza, which is planning to open a chain of hotels in his own country. The two will fall predictably in love, sealed at the end with a kiss and a visual joke, as Sandro knocks off Mirabel’s hat during the embrace and then, to her wonderment, attempts to improve its shape behind her back — a memory of how they first met. Pitched somewhere between the rambunctiousness of a Hawks and the suave elegance

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of a Lubitsch, Wyler’s direction extracts comic fun from Lennox Paule’s flustered Consul General, whose wild white hair seems to grow ever wilder and whiter as the Prince’s escapades escalate, and from gentle mockery of hotel service. The bellboy captain (robustly played by Paul Hurst) delivers a text for every day — for example, “The gentleman is not extinct”— to his charges, and instructs and asks them to demonstrate how to receive a tip with an appropriate look of surprise that modulates into a shy smile. Although Variety thought that the role of Sandro fitted Francis Lederer’s ability as a performer better than anything he had yet done, the performance has not worn well — he is much better at playing a superficial charmer in Mitchell Leisen’s classic Midnight (1939)— and looks too self-consciously ingratiating. Fortunately, his curdled charm is partly offset by the liveliness of Lionel Stander and Akim Tamiroff as the prince’s minders. As Mirabel, Frances Dee gives an extremely attractive performance, precariously trying to maintain her deception of social prominence under the gaze of envious and inquisitive hotel guests, as well as bemused waiters (particularly in an Italian restaurant where she orders from the menu what she thinks is a delicious local dish but is actually the proprietor’s name). This will lead to the film’s most highly charged and, in retrospect, characteristic scene, when she invites her wealthy socialite neighbors to tea on the mistaken assumption that she has been invited to join them at the charity ball, only to realize her mistake as she is progressively humiliated by her guests, led by the formidable Miss Channing (a sharply etched characterization from Benita Hume). Even then, few directors could match Wyler at scenes of class division and social embarrassment that can cut to the bone. The uncomfortable truthfulness of this scene amid the romantic fluff elsewhere has portents of things to come, for The Gay Deception was to be the last comedy Wyler would make for nearly two decades. Surprisingly, perhaps, it was the first film of his to gain an Oscar nomination (there were to be another 126 nominations to follow), in this case for its screen story and screenplay co-written by Don Hartman, who was later to become a chief executive at Paramount and a close ally and friend of Wyler, though the two were not always to see eye to eye. Most significantly of all, however, when Joel McCrea showed the film to Sam Goldwyn in the hope that he would then offer a contract to Frances Dee, who was McCrea’s wife, Goldwyn’s response was not quite what he had in mind. The film delighted Goldwyn, but his first reaction was: “Who directed it?” He was looking for a director for his controversial new project, an adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour— a very different kind of gay deception — and thinking that Wyler might be the man for the job. It was to be a life-changing moment for both men.

TWO Enter Sam Goldwyn Both personally and operationally the most idiosyncratic of the Hollywood moguls, Sam Goldwyn was already a movie legend by the time William Wyler came into his orbit. Born Schmuel Gelbfisz in a Warsaw ghetto in 1879, he had come to America at the age of 19, where he was named Samuel Goldfish by a baffled immigration official. He moved to Hollywood when persuaded by his then brother-in-law Jesse Lasky to go into the movie business; and then formed a new company with a Broadway producer, Edgar Selwyn, which they called the Goldwyn Picture Corporation, the name being a combination of their two surnames. Sam liked the name so much that he had his name changed legally to Goldwyn in 1918. The company was to evolve into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but Goldwyn by that time had decided to set up in business on his own. In one of his early Goldwynisms, he remarked, “I’ve always been independent, even when I had partners.” He quickly surrounded himself with prodigious talent. Among the stars he was to have under contract were Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper, Eddie Cantor, David Niven, Joel McCrea, Merle Oberon, Miriam Hopkins, and Danny Kaye. Equally impressive were the technicians and writers he recruited: cameraman Gregg Toland, musical supervisor Alfred Newman, designer Richard Day, editor Daniel Mandell, and an array of top writers that included Lillian Hellman, Ben Hecht, Sidney Kingsley, and Goldwyn’s regular trouble-shooter, Robert Sherwood, who was to say of him, “I can live with Sam as one lives with high blood pressure.” Although dedicated to family entertainment, Goldwyn also was a man of taste who wanted to raise his cultural profile with prestigious adaptations of literary and theatrical classics. He had the writers on board, but he needed a class director. Wyler was the answer to that need. “We had a love-hate relationship,” Wyler reflected, when asked in his final interview about his stormy ten-year partnership with Goldwyn. “We were good for each other. But our disagreements were never over money, they were always over subject-matter.... He was anxious to be connected with fine films” (Turner: 12). For all their arguments, there remained a great mutual professional respect between the two, and Goldwyn would support Wyler when he thought it was for the good of the picture. For example, when Goldwyn wanted to cast Myrna Loy in The Best Years of Our Lives and she hesitated because she had heard Wyler was an absolute sadist with actors, Goldwyn sprang to the director’s defense. “Oh no, that’s not true,” he said. “He’s just a very mean fellow.”

These Three (1936) “No problem — we’ll make them Americans”— Sam Goldwyn’s supposed response when told that the main characters of The Children’s Hour were alleged to be lesbians.

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A Wonderful Heart “I have seldom been so moved by any fictional film as by These Three. After ten minutes or so of the usual screen sentiment, quaintness and exaggeration, one began to watch with incredulous pleasure nothing less than life” — Graham Greene

These Three, in which the lives of two female schoolteachers are ruined by the spiteful lies of a student, was an important breakthrough film for Wyler. It was the beginning of a substantial association with a number of key collaborators in his future work: not only producer Sam Goldwyn but also designer Richard Day and editor Daniel Mandell. The writer Lillian Hellman was to become not only a screenwriter for Wyler (on These Three and Dead End) but the source of one of his most celebrated adaptations (The Little Foxes) and a close personal friend, through thick and thin. They had a similar social and political outlook and a mutual admiration of each other’s talent. “He showed that character could be action,” Hellman was to say of Wyler. “He’d hold the camera on an actor’s face for what seemed like forever, and then suddenly you’d see some look of recognition in an actor’s eye or somebody would step out of a shadow into the light and you’d be shocked out of your seat” (Easton: 269). There are numerous examples of this in These Three. When Merle Oberon casually remarks in her first meeting with Joel McCrea that they are talking as if they have known each other for years, and he says equally casually that that can happen sometimes, she suddenly looks at him again in close-up, as if the force of that observation has taken her by surprise and their relationship has taken an unexpected stride forward. The close-ups of Bonita Granville (as the evil Mary) are invariably striking. For example, when the girl Rosalie (Marcia Mae Jones) seems to be wavering in her support of Mary’s lie in the big confrontation scene, the close-up of Mary is that of a determined predator knowing that now is the time to move in for the kill. Above all, These Three marked Wyler’s first full collaboration with the cameraman Gregg Toland, whose photographic style, notably his mastery of composition in depth, was to have a massive influence on Wyler’s visual style, because it served his preference for long takes and multi-plane shots in which different acts and actors can be shown in the same frame without cutting. Ironically, Wyler and Toland had not got on too well in the early stages of shooting because Wyler was used to a situation where the cameraman was told by the director what to do, and Toland was a cameraman with ideas of his own. However, once they talked things over and Wyler appreciated Toland not simply as a technician but as a creative force, the two got on famously and developed what was to become one of the closest and most distinctive director/photographer partnerships of the classical Hollywood era. The photography is relatively restrained and undemonstrative in These Three, though there are occasionally striking images, particularly the shot of Mary hiding in the shadows and spying on Martha as she weeps alone in her room after hearing that Joe and Karen are to be married. The sinister effect is amplified when Mary later learns of the argument between Martha and her aunt, after the latter has accused Martha of being in love with Joe. On hearing this, Mary moves over to the spot on the landing where she first spied on Martha and grasps the significance of what she had seen. One can almost feel the relish with which she is turning this over in her mind for future malevolent use. The film was a breakthrough for Wyler, not only in terms of its team of cherished collaborators but also in terms of critical recognition. Of his previous films of the sound era, the best received had been Counsellor at Law, but in that instance it was the leading performance of John Barrymore that had particularly caught the eye. In the opening twenty minutes of These Three, there is nothing particularly striking cinematically. One enjoys

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Walter Brennan’s sharp cameo as the driver of his “taxy,” as he labels it, embellished by some comedy flourishes from Wyler (the vehicle’s explosive shift into gear, Breenan’s left-hand signal when there is clearly nowhere else to turn). And, as usual, Wyler brings great warmth to his love scenes, with McCrea furtively kissing Oberon’s hair and then, when she feels something, saying he was just removing a splinter, or his attempted proposal on a merrygo-round where he shouts “darling” at the wrong person. However, when the film reaches its dramatic core, which is the child’s lie about the schoolteachers and its devastating consequences, Wyler comes into his own and the critics were to recognize an ensemble triumph for which the director should be given much credit. Among many rave reviews, Frank Nugent in the New York Times (March 3, 1936) declared it “one of the finest screen dramas of recent years,” while Variety (February 22, 1936) described it as “a thoroughly fine cinematic transmutation of Lillian Hellman’s dramatic Broadway smash, The Children’s Hour ... reedited and retitled for Haysian purposes....” The Variety review alluded explicitly to the changes from the original necessitated by the Hays Code. One suspects that one of the reasons for the critical praise for the film was a recognition of its skill in negotiating its way around the impermissible lesbian theme of the play and yet retaining the power of its more dominant themes relating to the destructiveness of scandal and the power of a lie. Although the Hays Office forbade Goldwyn from publicizing the film as an adaptation of the play, Goldwyn calculated that the press would do that for him anyway, which, in many cases, they did. Wyler had some concern over whether the material nevertheless could work without that specific accusation — in other words, whether the lie in the film would be strong enough to generate the outrage it causes — but the critics seemed to feel that it did or, alternatively, chose to take it as a cunning coded equivalent for what happens in the play. It was Dashiell Hammett who first suggested the idea of the play to Hellman, recommending that she read William Roughead’s book of notorious criminal case histories, Bad Companions— particularly a case history called “Closed Doors,” about a Scottish school that had been forced to close in 1810 because of a child’s accusation of an alleged lesbian relationship between its owners ( Johnson: 108–9). Hellman updated the action to the 1930s and set the play in Lancet, 63 miles outside of Boston. The title derives from the 1859 poem of that name by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Between the dark and the daylight When the night is beginning to lower Comes a pause in the day’s occupation That is known as the Children’s Hour.

In the play, two young schoolteachers, Karen Wright and Martha Dobie, are accused of having a lesbian relationship by a malicious schoolgirl, Mary Tilford, whose grandmother ensures that the parents of all the other girls are informed and the pupils withdrawn from the school. When the teachers sue for slander, they lose the case. Eventually Mary’s lie is discovered, but not before Martha has disclosed to Karen that she now realizes she is indeed in love with her and, in her anguish of what she has caused, has committed suicide. First produced by Herman Shumlin in the Maxine Elliot Theatre in New York on November 20, 1934, the play caused a sensation and ran for a record-breaking 691 performances. The role of Martha in the original production was played by Anne Revere, later to become a distinguished screen actress, winning an Oscar for her performance as Elizabeth Taylor’s mother in National Velvet in 1945 before being blacklisted in 1951 for taking the

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Fifth Amendment when appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Significantly, when Wyler remade The Children’s Hour in 1961, it was very much that Cold War atmosphere he had in mind, where lives could be destroyed by malicious or ill-founded accusation. Despite its success, the play had been passed over for a Pulitzer Prize (the New York critics in retaliation promptly formed their own Drama Critics Circle and gave it their prize), and had been banned in Boston and Chicago; even in London, it was only allowed to be performed privately. By the time of the play’s gathering fame and notoriety, Hellman was under contract to Goldwyn and had contributed to his film, Dark Angel (1935). She suggested that she adapt her play for the screen. She fully recognized that the central situation would need to be changed because the Production Code at that time forbade what it called “sex perversion or any inference of it.” However, she argued that the play was not about lesbianism but about the power of a lie, and on that basis, the nature of the accusation could be changed without fundamentally altering the play’s main theme. The effectiveness of this strategy is open to debate. In These Three, the accusation that Martha is in love with Karen’s fiancé Joe — or that Mary has seen them together late in Martha’s room — might seem insufficiently scandalous to motivate Mrs. Tilford’s behavior in not only withdrawing Mary from the school without even checking her story but also alerting the parents of the entire school population — who dutifully follow suit. If many of the critics of the time seemed prepared to take that on trust as the film’s endeavor to solve a tricky censorship problem, some critics have since gone a little further. For example, John Baxter has argued, “Aside from a key confession of love for McCrea delivered by Hopkins with her back to the camera, she acts throughout as if her desire was for her companion” (116). It is an ingenious suggestion, but there is no evidence in the film to support it and a fair amount of evidence to the contrary. For example, the revelation of Martha’s forbidden love for Joe comes after she has been talking of her childhood and turns to discover that he is asleep; she motions to touch him, but then withdraws her hand and sits down in a chair to watch him. The camera pans to the window where a storm is raging and then there is a fade to black to indicate a passage of time. When the camera pans back, Martha is in the same position in her chair and still looking at Joe, her devotion to him thus being delicately suggested without a word being said. There is also an earlier scene when Martha is decorating the house and is clearly excited by Joe’s arrival (she takes off her glasses and straightens her hair). Her evident disappointment when he moves off to find Karen would make little sense if the film’s subversive strategy were to suggest Martha’s secret love for Karen. My conviction is that Wyler was not attempting to circumvent the Production Code but playing straight with the alternative dramatic situation that Hellman has contrived, and doing his best to make it work. If the film still packs a powerful dramatic punch, this is due to the strengths it contains elsewhere, most notably from what Variety called the “inspired” acting of the two main children in the cast: Bonita Granville as the malicious and deceitful Mary, and Marcia Mae Jones as the hapless, victimized Rosalie, who falls under Mary’s spell. Apparently, some of the adults in the cast grumbled at the amount of time Wyler devoted to Bonita Granville in the shaping of her performance, but it certainly paid off. Every gesture and movement seem characteristic and revealing of a child who revels in her power over others and her boundless capacity for mischief. In a particularly wonderful shot, after she sees how she can use Rosalie to support her story, Mary positively skips and leaps down the stairs to confront her hapless friend. Her delight at the way things seem to be working out in her favor is almost palpable — she has the luck of an Iago. The character’s alarming intelligence is

TWO. Enter Sam Goldwyn

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superbly conveyed by Granville, who gives a well-nigh definitive performance of the childhorror and was rightly nominated for an Oscar. One writer who was bowled over by the performance and the film was Graham Greene, at that time the most fierce, feared, and incisive critic in the U.K., and still the most quoted of all film critics of that era; and it would be worth dwelling for a moment on what Greene particularly admired. In his review in the Spectator (May 1, 1936), he was critical of the opening ten minutes or so (for their “sentiment, quaintness, and exaggeration”), and he thought the happy ending in Vienna, which sees Karen reunited with Joe, “blurred and softened for the film public.” It would be difficult to quarrel with either of those judgments: the only interest for a film scholar about the final scene is that one of the young technical advisers was Fred Zinnemann, later to become a major director in his own right, of course, and whose film Julia (1977) was to be based on a personal memoir by Lillian Hellman (with Jane Fonda in the role of Lillian). Nevertheless, Greene thought both Merle Oberon and Miriam Hopkins were admirable once into the central situation, and expressive of what he called “innocence in an evil world.” However, Greene was most impressed by the presentation of the world of childhood, which he thought had “never been represented so convincingly on screen, with an authenticity guaranteed by one’s own memories” [my italics]. What Greene is alluding to in that last phrase is something that was not widely known until the publication of Greene’s autobiography in 1971: namely, that he had been bullied to the point of attempted suicide at the school at which his father was headmaster, and that he was recognizing in the relationship between Mary and Rosalie something of the torment that he had experienced at the hands of a boy called Carter — whom he came to see as evil incarnate. “The more than human evil of the lying sadistic child,” he went on, “ is suggested with quite shocking mastery by Bonita Granville ... it has enough truth and intensity to stand for the whole of the dark side of childhood, in which the ignorance of the many allows complete mastery to the few” (Greene: 72). He was almost equally impressed by the performance of Marcia Mae Jones as Rosalie, whom Mary is blackmailing into doing her bidding after discovering Rosalie’s theft of a bracelet. Although Greene had been part of a press audience that apparently laughed at the moment when Rosalie is forced to swear an oath of allegiance to Mary, Greene himself found the incident not only convincing but chilling — an example of the kind of taboos that exist in a child’s world and that can carry unreasonable power. There is no doubt that These Three had an enormous personal resonance for Greene, which is the reason he writes about it more sympathetically and passionately than any other critic. By the same token, the fact that it could move him so deeply — a critic notoriously difficult to please and often disdainful of mainstream Hollywood cinema (one recalls the hot water he got into in his salacious delineation of the appeal of Shirley Temple)— is a tribute to the film’s artistry. Another English critic (shortly to become an American citizen) who admired the film greatly was Alistair Cooke. Writing in the pages of the fledgling film magazine Sight and Sound in the summer of 1936, Cooke said, “William Wyler’s directing used the distance between us and the characters for the most effective and bloodless Aristotelian purpose, tracking the camera relentlessly up to their faces when we would rather have them escape from their problem, scuttling painfully away from them when we ached to give them a warm embrace” (Madsen: 133). It is an acute observation of one of the film’s stylistic characteristics. When Mary reiterates the phrase “that awful night” (when she saw Martha crying) and notices the grandmother’s discomfort, the camera tracks in both for emphasis and to convey a horrible sense of entrapment. Once Mary has ensnared and frightened her grand-

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mother with this phrase, one feels Mrs. Tilford cannot avoid having to follow through its consequences. Conversely, after the courtroom verdict, Karen and Martha sit alone in the school, and the camera tracks away from the window to the storm outside. No words are needed to express the desolation they feel; the camera movement does it for them. By the end of the 1930s, Lewis Jacobs was writing of Wyler, “His films steadily grow in stature: his content becomes deeper, his execution more thoughtful, his problems more vital and relevant.... His films ... reveal his increasing social awareness, sharper sensitivity and penetration into character, and conscious effort at organic unity that springs from a real and serious interest in the film medium” ( Jacobs: 490–1). Although These Three does not entirely transcend the censorship impositions on the original material — it would be twenty-five years before Wyler is allowed to do that in The Children’s Hour, and fully realize the work’s tragic power — it proved a massive step forward for his career. It got him noticed and it set a path for him to follow. During the next ten years he was scarcely to put a foot wrong.

Dodsworth (1936) “My vote for one of the world’s 10 best films”— David Mamet “‘I’ve been too weak with her,’ he said weakly”— Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth, Chapter 15

Dodsworth seems to me Wyler’s best film of the decade and one of the greatest Hollywood films of the 1930s. It is Wyler’s first fully realized film, both in terms of the quality of the execution and the seriousness and ambition of the themes. Its observation of Americans in European society often has a Jamesian sophistication and wit (the deftness and delicacy of its revelations of indiscretion and infidelity also have echoes of the cinematic world of Lubitsch), while its incisive analysis of a disintegrating marriage and the painful realities of the aging process have unusual maturity. Whether Goldwyn managed to turn a profit on a film about the malaise of middle age is open to some dispute. When Sinclair Lewis’s novel was published in 1929 (a year before he became the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature), Goldwyn had the opportunity to buy the rights for $20,000 and he turned it down. In 1934, after the book had been adapted successfully for Broadway by Sidney Howard, the rights cost Goldwyn $150,000 to acquire, but he had no regrets. “This way I buy a successful play,” he said. “Before it was just a novel.” That is sometimes offered as an example of Goldwyn’s eccentricity, though Wyler thought it demonstrated his shrewdness. It certainly added to his prestige — the film was nominated for seven Oscars, including Wyler’s first nomination for best direction, and won one for Richard Day’s remarkable art direction. It is one of the films from the Goldwyn stable that has surely stood the test of time. Because it is rarely revived, however, it will be necessary to sketch out the background and plot in some detail. Having triumphed in the role of Dodsworth on the Broadway stage, Walter Huston was the logical choice for the role on film. Although he was not a big box-office name, it seems that Goldwyn never considered anyone else for the role. One of his up-and-coming contract players, David Niven, was also given a small but important role as one of the early romantic temptations that cross the path of Dodsworth’s insecure wife, Fran. Rosalind Russell was considered for the role of Edith Cortright, the divorcee with whom Dodsworth will become involved after his estrangement from his wife, but Wyler felt her personality was

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not striking enough, and the role went instead to Mary Astor, who plays the part beautifully and for whom the character was to become the favorite of all her film roles. The part had been played on stage by Huston’s wife, Nan Sutherland, which might have led to some tension between Astor and Huston, with whom he shares all her scenes, but according to Astor, “Huston had the good taste and wisdom never to bring it up” (Astor: 120). She was to find Wyler “intelligent, tough, meticulous and picky,” with “a sharp tongue, sometimes sarcastic and impatient” (Astor: 118). The role came to her rescue when, while making the film, she sued for custody of her daughter after divorcing her second husband, and details of her private life were being used against her and attracting lurid nationwide headlines. “When I sat in the witness chair for hours and answered questions that would have broken me up completely,” Astor wrote, “I kept the little pot boiling that was Edith Cortright. I sat a little straighter, I wore clean white gloves, and kept my hands quiet. I was completely rattleproof, thanks to Edith Cortright. She was my shield. Without her ... I would have been shattered emotionally by the ugliness of that trial” (Astor: 126). The most contentious piece of casting proved to be that of the role of Fran Dodsworth. On stage the part had been played by Fay Bainter, who was later superb under Wyler’s direction in Jezebel and The Children’s Hour. In the film the part is played by Ruth Chatterton, an experienced stage star whose career on screen had been less distinguished prior to this film. By all accounts, she hated Wyler and disagreed with every aspect of his direction. Mary Astor recalled that Chatterton even grumbled one day about the white linen shirt and slacks Wyler wore while directing, complaining that they were distracting her attention. When Wyler asked if she would like him to leave the studio, she replied, “I would indeed, but I’m afraid that can’t be arranged.” As Astor recalled, “[Wyler] was stubborn and smiling and it drove her to furious outbursts. She didn’t like the role of the wife of Sam Dodsworth because the character was that of a woman who is trying to hang onto her youth — which was exactly what Ruth herself was doing. It touched a nerve. But she gave a beautiful performance in spite of herself ” (Astor: 119). Anticipating the battle Wyler was to have with Bette Davis as Regina in The Little Foxes, the feud turned on a fundamental difference of interpretation. Chatterton wanted to portray Fran as a mean-minded soul who deserved what she got, whereas Wyler wanted to show a more sympathetic side to her dilemma, a woman who has done her duty during over 20 years of marriage but who now wants to step out of her husband’s shadow and savor life before it is too late. It was to prove Chatterton’s most memorable film role, and, in the view of John Russell Taylor, “one of the great performances of the American cinema” (Taylor: 493). The opening is a model of visual clarity and conciseness of the kind André Bazin admired so much about Wyler’s style. As the camera moves forward, we see a man staring out of his office window at the huge sign that establishes the setting as that of the plant of Dodsworth Motors. A sense of melancholy in the air, underlined by the strains of “Auld Lang Syne” over the soundtrack, is explained by the headline of the local newspaper that lies on Dodsworth’s desk: his company has been sold to a Detroit combine, Union Motors. Next to the newspaper is a framed photograph of his wife, which will cue her appearance in the next main scene but also hint at the influence she has had over his decision. A secretary informs him that “the men are ready, Mr. Dodsworth,” and we follow him as he moves among a large gathering of employees who have assembled to pay their respects and to wish him well. As he is being driven away from the plant in a company car, he turns to take a last look behind him at the manufacturing plant he had created and where he had spent all his working life.

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This introduction takes only about three minutes and yet is packed with information and thematic and visual motifs that are to be developed in the narrative. We are given a sense not only of a hugely successful American businessman but also of a popular employer who is leaving with some regret. The newspaper headline not only reveals the essential information but also discloses the location: the small town of Zenith in which Dodsworth has been the big name. Much of the rest of the film will see Dodsworth dwarfed by his surroundings, and concern itself with his feelings of unease in strange surroundings, which provide him with no outlet for his energies. This is in stark contrast to his wife, Fran, for whom an escape from Zenith is a necessary prerequisite for a new start. The window shot that opens the film foretells a number of similar shots where the couple look out onto an environment or landscape that is very different from the one they have left, and offers not simply change and opportunity but also the possibility of danger and loneliness. In conversation at home with his banker and best friend Tubby (Harlan Briggs), who disapproves of the retirement plans and indeed thinks them un–American, Dodsworth explains that he now wants to enjoy his leisure and get a perspective on America through a long-awaited trip to Europe. It becomes clear, however, that his younger wife, who has done her duty by him and by the family (her daughter is now married and on her honeymoon) is seeking to expand her horizons in all directions. She is not seeking leisure, but all the things she feels she has missed in her life and wants to experience while there is still time. The brittle charm of Europe will expose the husband’s social awkwardness and feed the wife’s hunger for a last fling at emotional fulfillment. The small marital tensions that hitherto have been contained within the small-town environment will crack wide open on the larger European stage. The unexpected and ironic outcome of this collision of cultures is that, at the end, it will be Dodsworth who will be staying in Europe and Fran who is heading back to America. At the outset, however, Dodsworth is prepared to go along with what Fran wants. “Did I remember to tell you today that I adore you?” he says. Being seen off by best friends Tubby and his wife Matey (Spring Byington), the Dodsworths are about to set sail on the Queen Mary from New York to London when they are unexpectedly joined by their newlywed daughter Emily (Kathryn Marlowe) and sonin-law ( John Payne), who have flown from Nassau to bid them farewell. What follows is a single-take scene of greeting and departure, with much overlapping dialogue. It is a measure of the skill of Wyler and his splendid screenwriter, Sidney Howard, that they can unobtrusively sneak in details beneath the seeming spontaneity that are to have some resonance later. When the film was revived to great acclaim in the 1970s, Wyler recalled a line that got an unintended laugh from the young audience: Dodsworth’s exclamation to his daughter in this scene, “I don’t want you flying around in aeroplanes!”; the line had dated, he realized, though, in fact, air travel in those days was, as he said, “very unusual” (Miller: 122). In fact, Huston delivers the line with a chuckle in the voice, as if recognizing a father’s overprotectiveness, so the laugh is with Dodsworth rather than at him. The line gains retrospective importance, however, when by the end of the film his thoughts are turning to a Moscow to Seattle airline and a new industrial venture: air travel is now symbolic both of a change of direction in his life and an energizing of his faculties. There are two other minor details in the farewell sequence that will later gather greater significance. A naval officer shouts “All ashore” for those who have now to disembark (and we see Fran practically pushing the others toward the exit in her impatience to get started on her journey); a similar moment in the final scene between Sam and Fran will have all the more dramatic edge because of the stark contrast of mood to this earlier scene, and our

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recognition of the turbulent sea-change of emotions that has happened in between. Similarly, when they are waving farewell to the people on the quayside, Sam waves his hat frantically and then replaces it in a cockeyed manner which Fran, ever conscious of propriety, corrects. The gesture with the hat will be recalled in their final scene but in a way that emphasizes their separation, not their togetherness. For all their shared excitement about the voyage, there are hints of the ensuing discord to come. The couple are initially shown as fish out of water, when, against Sam’s inclination, Fran insists that they dress for dinner on the first night, only to find that the other passengers are dressed quite informally and thus inadvertently draws attention to their social awkwardness. Fran almost immediately attracts the attention of Captain Lockert (David Niven), whose well-practiced flattery is seen through immediately by Sam (in a telling reaction shot and his barely audible and sarcastic murmur, “Very good” at Lockert’s polished compliment), but whose transparency Fran either does not notice or chooses to ignore. Lockert has been efficiently introduced into the narrative a little earlier when, seeing Dodsworth and Fran in a gentle embrace when passing their cabin, he has curtly kicked their cabin door shut, causing them to jump. With that one gesture, we have an insight into his nature (a gentlemanly romantic would have closed the door quietly) and the way his presence will disturb the closeness of the couple. For his part, Dodsworth will attract the attention of the divorcée Edith Cortright, who is introduced much earlier and more effectively in the film than in the novel, appearing out of the shadows to share his excitement of discovery, and who is to steer Dodsworth eventually to a realization of what he is after. These two romantic strands emerge as the voyage nears its end. Wyler crosscuts adroitly between two phases of the drama: the first encounter between Dodsworth and Mrs. Cortright, as he catches sight of the light off Bishop’s Rock (his first glimpse of what he calls “England, Mother England”) and where, unlike Fran, Edith views his enthusiasm sympathetically and even then seems a potential soul-mate; and the final tryst between Fran and Lockert, which ends in embarrassment and recrimination as the suave Englishman makes clear he has seen their friendship as a prelude to an affair. Fran is insulted by his assumptions but at the same time fearful of her own inclinations. The crux of the potential gulf between Dodsworth and Fran is hinted at here. Whereas Dodsworth is hungering for the excitement of new places where he has never been, Fran is yearning for new experiences but apprehensive about where they might take her. When Lockert tells her that “So much of you has never been given a chance,” one can recognize the seductive intent behind the observation, but at the same time sense a measure of truth. Something within Fran is clearly unsatisfied, and might lure her into situations where she is clearly out of her depth; and she is honest enough to confess her fears about herself to her husband and ask for his protection. Indeed, fear — of what people might think of her, of life passing her by, of the temptation of adultery — is perhaps the strongest motivational pressure now in Fran’s life, and the reason that for much of the film she seems in a state of tremulous tension. It is also the reason that we can feel some sympathy for her desperation in the midst of her petulance and self-centeredness, and why Ruth Chatterton’s performance becomes cumulatively moving because of, rather than in spite of, its complete absence of sentimentality. For the moment, though, a crisis is averted as Fran twists her husband’s handkerchief (and him) around her little finger, and persuades him to bypass London for Paris. Unfortunately, the pattern of behavior established on the boat begins to repeat itself in Paris. Wyler emphasizes the connection with a similar scene-by-scene structure but in a harsher key. Again we have an initial scene between husband and wife in their room, where

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they seem at first contented and relaxed, but where the husband’s interest is in his lavish surroundings, whereas the wife’s interest is more in the ostensibly prestigious society in which she has come to move. Once again Wyler underlines the contrast through crosscutting between two different planes of action: Dodsworth waiting in vain to be joined by his wife at the Café Fais; and Fran dining at the Ritz with her new friend Renee de Penable (Odette Myrtil), then forgetting all about Sam when they are joined by a suave financier, Arnold Iselin (Paul Lukas), who offers to become part of her Paris in exactly the same way as Lockert has offered to be her guide in the manners of England and Europe. Once again a romantic flirtation is floated as a possibility and once again it will lead to an argument between husband and wife. However, the stakes this time seem a lot higher, and Wyler will stage what is probably American cinema’s most powerful and painful marital row since the coming of the talkies. Its prelude is a dinner party that the Dodsworths give in their hotel room for their guests Madame de Penable, Iselin, their friend Kurt von Obersdorf (Gregory Gaye), and Edith Cortright. As the guests prepare to leave, the chatter is light and relaxed, but certain pockets of tension begin to become apparent. One senses Fran’s embarrassment at her husband’s clumsiness when retrieving Renee Penable’s wrap (it takes him a while to figure out which way up it is supposed to be), and she lets slip that the occasion is her birthday. When the others protest that she should have told them, she says, “No woman enjoys getting to be 35.” Ruth Chatterton delivers the line quickly, with a defiant smile, as if daring contradiction. Wyler cuts to a reaction shot of her husband, who gives her an ironic look (Chatterton, incidentally, was 43 when she made the film). There is a momentary embarrassed pause before Mrs. Cortright responds in a manner that seems both knowing and tactful, as if she recognizes what is going on but is not unsympathetic to the motive behind it. “When you’re my age,” she says, “ you’ll look back on 35 as a most agreeable time of life.” Fran seems to sense irony, not tact, rivalry more than recognition, and replies quite sharply, “I hope I’ll look as young as you do — when I’m your age,” to which Mrs. Cortright says, “You’re almost sure to, my dear.” It is a beautifully acted little cameo that takes one to the heart of both characters. Almost by accident, Mrs. Cortright has penetrated one of Fran’s defenses — her fear of growing old — and when she sees Iselin slip Fran his card and kiss her hand in a suggestive way (“Nerves, dear lady?” he whispers, like Lockert picking up on Fran’s mingled delight and apprehension at attracting male attention), she cannot help responding discreetly but decisively. “My dear — don’t,” she says. “What?” Fran snaps back, surprised, to which Mrs. Cortright says, “You’re so charming.” The warning seems to be directed not simply at the danger of a casual affair but at the denial of a more genuine, generous self that she has sensed behind Fran’s façade. That simple word “Don’t” is to recur at a significant point near the end of the film to signal an imminent dramatic turn in the narrative. The guests have all left. “Then, to our surprise,” writes Albert LaValley in a fine analysis” of the film, “the scene doesn’t end, but Sam and Fran go to their bedroom, proceed to undress before the camera and walk around in their underclothes and nightclothes” (LaValley: 282). We are indeed taken a little off-guard by this unexpected intimacy. It adds an extra frisson to the sudden emotional exposure, where a discussion of the evening moves quickly into an argument, in which Dodsworth expresses his dislike of Fran’s friends and his desire that they should go home, while she is equally vehement in her desire to stay and be part of an exciting and exclusive social setup. Wyler’s staging is quite daring, for the sight of a man in his garters is more often a cue for farce than drama. The visual incongruity gives an edge to the increasing ugliness of their tempers, Dodsworth’s ungainly appearance

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seeming to emphasize his age and lack of sexual appeal just as Fran’s smearing of her skin with face cream shows her attempt to arrest the ravages of time. Not for the first time in the film she looks anxiously in the mirror to check her appearance; she also (unnoticed by Sam) looks quickly at Arnold Iselin’s card as if wondering what it might portend. Voices are raised, and they receive a phone call complaining about the noise, which adds particularly to Fran’s sense of humiliation. (As the film goes on, phone calls will become increasingly significant, culminating in a moment toward the end when a ringing phone in the foreground of the shot will, as it were, hold the futures of the three main characters on a thread.) Just as visually Sam and Fran are made to embody the least attractive aspects of aging, Wyler’s framing makes one aware of the largeness of the rooms, the antagonistic space around husband and wife, and the widening chasm between them. Lighting is also used in a very expressive manner that will anticipate Wyler’s later partnerships with Gregg Toland, so that Sam at one stage is seated in brooding shadow at the foreground of the shot (emphasizing his mood but also his helplessness) while in the background and in the light Fran paces theatrically and demands some space of her own so that she can breathe. Without telling her husband, she has rented a villa in Switzerland with Madame de Penable and is planning to stay there for a few months while Sam returns to America. She is not simply suggesting that Sam can return home without her; she is finally insisting on it. “You’re simply rushing at old age, Sam,” she tells him, “and I’m not ready for that.” The scene concludes with a long shot of Sam in deep shadow as he slowly crosses the room to the hotel phone. When Fran, standing in a shaft of light by the doorway, asks him what he is doing, he replies, “I just thought I’d see the first boat I could catch.” Fade to black. Varying the mood, Wyler and Sidney Howard inject an element of social comedy into Dodsworth’s return home, as he finds everything has changed in his absence. His humidor is now being used as a plant-pot; he cannot find his mail in the usual place on his desk (the fact that he has no mail seems beside the point); and he cannot even offer his best friend a drink (he doesn’t actually want one), because his son-in-law has the key to his drinks cabinet and has not yet returned home from work. Wyler and Huston orchestrate Dodsworth’s petulant indignation in fine style, so that when his unsuspecting son-in-law Harry finally arrives and asks brightly, “Hello everybody, how about a drink?,” Dodsworth’s look of hostility and the deathly silence that follows strike home with some comic force. Yet one is always aware of what is behind Dodsworth’s display of anger, which is displaced anxiety caused by Fran’s failure to respond to his cabled request that she come home. The scene is also a subtle, almost subliminal, reminder of the first scene in which Fran had appeared, actually seeing to all those home comforts that Sam now misses and which she had been routinely and daily attending to for years. It might cause one to reevaluate the brief scenes preceding Sam’s outburst at home, when we have seen Fran enjoying herself on a speedboat with Iselin and Kurt and for the moment experiencing the release and the life she craved and to which she now feels, with some justification, entitled. The next step, though, is a perilous one: does her desire for freedom and life extend to having an affair that might threaten her marriage? The scene on the balcony of her villa with Iselin will feature one of Wyler’s most ingenious and overt pieces of visual symbolism. Fran has received a letter from Sam and placed it casually under a paperweight, but Iselin insists that she read it and makes his intention of seduction abundantly clear. Sam is the past and might even be the future, but Iselin is the present. “Afraid, Fran?” he asks, the phrase echoing Fran’s own declaration of fear after her earlier romance with Lockert. She is desirous of, and susceptible to, flattery and flirtation but also petrified of the possible

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consequences. Kurt and Renee have left the balcony to play some music, and while the strains of Debussy’s “Girl with Flaxen Hair” are heard coming from the music room, Iselin moves in on Fran and starts to make love. The camera closes in on Sam’s letter in Fran’s hand and on Iselin’s lighter as he sets fire to it, takes it from her hand, and allows it to blow away. The shot of the burning letter fluttering away before landing in ashes on the ground is a discreet but powerful moment, implying the adulterous development to follow but much more besides. Mary Astor expressed puzzlement at Wyler’s spending an entire afternoon photographing the flight of that letter before he was satisfied. “He wanted it to go slowly for a while,” she wrote, “then stop, then flutter along a little further, and finally be caught up in a gust...” (Astor: 122). Wyler took pains over the shot because it is an important moment in the film and “one of the most stunning moments of visual poetry in all of Wyler’s movies,” according to Jan Herman, who saw it as “a summary of the film’s theme in a single emblematic image: failed marriage, illusory dreams, capricious fate” (Herman: 159). The moment is also emblematic of Fran herself, drifting slowly toward an illicit affair, checking herself, then fluttering into submission and being carried by the moment over an emotional precipice. The brief flame that flares and then fizzles out stands not only for the ashes of her marriage but, in retrospect, for the affair itself. The flare of passion will prove to be destructive and short-lived, and will fizzle out in disappointment. In fact, with the aid of some undercover detective work, Dodsworth will find out about the affaire and contrive a meeting in Paris in which the three confront each other. It becomes clear, through Dodsworth’s forcing the situation out into the open, that Iselin does not love Fran and that she does not want a divorce. Prior to Iselin’s entry into their hotel room unaware of the situation Dodsworth has set up, Wyler places Fran in the foreground of the frame in shadow, which gives an added emphasis to her jerk of surprise when her lover enters the room. Dodsworth has the advantage over the other two participants, and his every movement in this scene upstages the others in a manner that underlines his occupancy of the moral high-ground while Fran and Iselin drift to the fringes of the frame as if in retreat. Iselin’s European worldliness — his expression of distaste at the scene, his rather pompous reference to Othello— rings hollowly in the wake of Dodsworth’s American directness, which makes up for in candor what it might lack in discretion. Iselin’s last words are curiously directed to Dodsworth rather than Fran, wishing him peace of mind. His abrupt exit seems to signify the small forgettable part that Fran has played in his life. “I’m so sorry, Sam, I’m so terribly sorry,” Fran says, her head in her hands. Some of her most poignant moments occur when we cannot see her face and where she seems consciously trying to hide both her humiliation and her vulnerability. The marriage and the European tour will continue, but in December they will return to Zenith. “Home in December,” says Fran, quietly, almost to herself, “Zenith in December.” In Ruth Chatterton’s sensitive delivery, the line seems to carry with it a feeling deeper than sadness: it sounds like a life-sentence. Sam cheers her momentarily when he says she will want to be home in December because Emily is having a baby, but as Fran picks up the phone to ring through with her congratulations, he adds the killer blow: “We’ll have to learn to behave ourselves when we’ll be a couple of old grandparents.” There is a close-up of Fran’s stricken face as she holds the phone; we hear the click as the receiver is replaced, and Wyler closes with a shot of Sam, smiling wickedly. He has had his revenge after all. It is a striking moment, as if cautioning us against a too simplistic view of an adult situation. Fran has certainly been unfaithful and deceitful but even Sam, to his credit, has acknowledged that maybe Iselin has given her something he could not provide. Yet he also knows that her sensitivity about

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her age is her Achilles heel (at a later stage, it will come close to destroying all her hopes for the future), and one does wonder about a man who, while professing still to love her, seems to take perverse pleasure in calculatedly pressing on a sensitive nerve. One never sees this the other way around. Indeed, when Fran has hurt Sam, we see her making endeavors to ameliorate the pain. The film’s refusal to distribute sympathy along conventional lines is a measure of its maturity and its recognition that it takes two to make a divorce as well as a marriage. Actually — and in a way that hints at Fran’s continuing sway over Sam — they are still in Europe when their grandson is born. The somber lighting casts a brooding atmosphere as Fran says, “I love Vienna,” and Sam says, “I love you.” The reconciliation is holding, but precariously, as Sam is still anxious to return to America while Fran is equally desirous of staying where they are. “I’ve lost my bearings, I don’t know where I’m heading,” he says. “I was such a child when I married you,” cries Fran in response (and indeed she would only have been around 20 years of age), “It isn’t fair....” She never gets to finish that sentence, and the refrain hangs in the air, to return more poignantly in a later context. The immediate source of conflict is a phone call Sam is trying to place from their hotel room. He wishes to speak to his daughter after the birth of her baby before he and Fran go out to dine with their friend, Kurt von Obersdorf. Sam is anxious about his daughter and so is Fran, though even more anxious in case Kurt arrives during the phone conversation and be reminded that she is a grandmother. Sam gives in to her feelings on this matter but, possibly as a result of this, rather testily suggests that Fran and Kurt go dancing together, as there is no pleasure for him in sitting and watching them dance. The irritation seems to go beyond the failed phone call, the reminder of his social gaucheness, and the age difference between himself and his wife: there is his dawning suspicion about Fran’s developing relationship with Kurt. The suspicion is confirmed in a superb moment when Fran and Kurt return to the hotel at the end of the evening, and, in a mirror shot, we observe Fran’s movement to the door of Sam’s room on the right of the frame to check that he is asleep, while Kurt moves to the left and watches her: a visual suggestion of a new triangle is delicately suggested. Kurt declares his love before he leaves. There is a horizontal wipe to emphasize Fran’s angry frustration at her lack of freedom, as she strides to her own room and slams the door, at which point Sam appears, notices Fran’s open purse and makeup mirror on the couch and senses what might have been occurring between her and Kurt. There is a rather daring moment for its time when Sam knocks at Fran’s door and she appears, covered only by a bathroom towel. It is evident from her reaction that she was expecting it to be Kurt. Another argument flares. She tells him of Kurt’s love for her; and divorce now seems inevitable. “I’m fighting for life, you can’t drag me back!” she cries. Wyler dissolves from a shot of Sam walking slowly back to his room to a shot of Sam walking in the opposite direction on a crowded platform in Vienna with his wife. The reversal of direction seems not simply dramatic contrast but a suggestion of a decisive turning point in his life. Sam is silent, disconsolate, close to tears; Fran is trying to lift his spirits and remember the good times. “Sam, do try not to be dreadfully lonely,” she says, as he boards the train to Paris. Sam’s only words are “Goodbye,” and then, as the train is about to leave: “Did I remember to tell you today that I adore you?” Huston speaks the line with a compelling quietness, making it sound less like a sentiment than a memory, in which an ostensible declaration of love is now coated with retrospective irony and sadness. The train pulls out. We are given a point of view shot from Sam’s perspective as he watches the figure of his beloved Fran recede into the distance, an image eloquently suggestive of his “roaring

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loneliness” (to borrow Sinclair Lewis’s phrase in the novel) before he closes the carriage door. It seems like the end of the scene, but Wyler has a tiny shock up his sleeve. Cutting back to Fran on the platform, he reveals that Kurt has been there all the time and can now join her, at which point Fran can give way to her real emotions and sob on his shoulder. It expands and darkens the emotional coloration of an exceptionally fine scene, suggesting the parting has been as painful for Fran as for Sam, as well being a clever visual analogy to one of the most noticeable characteristics of Lewis’s literary style: namely, the elaborate sentence that saves its sting, or kick, or calculated bathos, until the very last phrase (e.g., “Sam was quiet, extremely observant, not exactly jolly, as he surveyed that regiment of twenty people, all nibbling so delicately at their salmon and at other people’s reputations”). Wyler now has everything in place to move confidently to the film’s conclusion. LaValley thought the film’s “weakest moments occur near the finale and ... appear to be too hurried a need to tidy matters up” (LaValley: 280), whereas it seems to me that the film’s greatest moments occur near the end; that the concise precision of these scenes is profoundly satisfying; and that they represent Wyler’s finest directing achievement up to this time. Having shown his aimless wandering around Europe through a montage of travel stickers, Wyler’s staging of Dodsworth’s fortuitous reunion with Mrs. Cortright in the American Express office in Naples is a marvel of visual organization: it was a scene much admired by playwright David Mamet. One senses as soon as she enters the office after Dodsworth that something momentous might be about to take place, as one has sensed mutual empathy from their first meeting. Enormous suspense is generated from the perfectly natural way the two people who seem destined for each other are both so preoccupied with their own business at different parts of the room that the opportunity for reunion might be lost. Both are shown at a different counter attending to their affairs and, agonizingly, sometimes in the same frame, but neither noticing the other’s presence. With an unobtrusive visual exactness, Wyler stretches the audience’s anxiety, spacing and pacing the scene to perfection, so that Mrs. Cortright is almost out of the office (and out of the picture) when she chances to hear the name “Dodsworth” being called out as he orders a car, and she is drawn back. That single moment would alone justify the film’s title, for the whole future direction of Edith Cortright is to turn on her hearing the name; and for Dodsworth himself, that casual call from an office clerk for a car for Mr. Dodsworth to take him on another empty time-filling travel excursion will, inadvertently but crucially, usher in a reunion that will signal the end of his loneliness and change his life. If Sam’s emotional rejuvenation comes after his despairing departure from Vienna, Fran’s destiny follows an opposite trajectory. The promise of a new life with Kurt after her parting from Sam ends in bitter disillusionment, when Kurt’s mother, the Baroness von Obersdorf, opposes the proposed marriage, and Kurt is too weak to rebel against her will. In the novel, the confrontation is described by Fran in a letter to Sam, so that we are only given her face-saving account of what has happened and have to read between the lines. For the film, Sidney Howard dramatized a brilliantly characterized three-dimensional scene in which the humiliation of both Fran and Kurt is excruciating to behold as they wilt before the intimidating Old World morality and obduracy of the baroness, an imperious fiveminute cameo from Maria Ouspenskaya that was deservedly nominated for an Oscar. One can sense the tension immediately the baroness enters the room, and Ruth Chatterton is particularly fine in this scene also, conveying Fran’s nervousness beneath the applied charm so that one senses the desperation of a woman grasping at what she feels might be her last chance of happiness. There is a moment of Jamesian embarrassment (it is indeed like a

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scene in The Europeans in reverse, when the European heroine has visited the mother of the American family for the first time and her effusive behavior has made a less than favorable impression) when Fran’s gushing compliment —“I love your mother and I hope she is going to love me”— lands with a dull thud and seems so inappropriate to the occasion that an already awkward situation grows even more tense. The chill in the air is accentuated by the sight of the snow through the window, and the baroness’s refusal of Fran’s offer to light a fire on her behalf or even to agree to a cup of coffee. Kurt tries a conciliatory strategy by declaring that his mother wishes them to postpone their marriage, but the baroness promptly makes it clear that postponement was not what she had in mind but termination, and Kurt is banished from the room as the Old and New World get down to business and shared hostilities. During the exchange between Fran and the baroness, there is an extraordinary photographic effect whereby the cross around the baroness’s neck glows alternately light and dark in time with her breathing. It seems to give her an almost supernatural authority and to sap Fran’s aura. It is clear from the outset that the religious dimension to the marriage will be problematic for the noble family, as Fran will be a divorcée. As delicately as she can, Fran tries to override that objection by pointing out that she is wealthy and could bring a handsome fortune into a family that has suffered since the war. If money might triumph over the religious objection, there is another thing that money cannot buy; and one can feel Fran’s terror rising as the baroness homes in on the question of children and of Fran’s age. Leaning forward as if to make the fatal thrust in a duel, the baroness asks, “Have you thought how little happiness there can be for the old wife of a young husband?” It is a deadly question that seems to leave Fran fighting for breath and forces her to her feet as if struck, for behind it lies not only the awful confirmation of the age difference but the baroness’s tacit acknowledgment and acceptance of the prevailing patriarchal ideology and moral double standards of her society. For a woman in Fran’s situation, she would have to accept the inevitability of Kurt’s future infidelities and indifference as the way of the world. There is nothing more to be said. Fran calls for Kurt to tell him his mother is leaving. “I am sorry if I have hurt you,” says the baroness to Fran. “I’m very glad to...” begins Fran in reply, and then, as if sensing that this was part of a prepared speech for an entirely different outcome, she checks herself and simply says, “Goodbye.” Ruth Chatterton delivers that line with quiet dignity and is at her most moving in the following moments when, as Kurt shows his mother to her carriage, she bursts into tears, her back to the camera, suggesting someone trying to conceal her humiliation from public scrutiny while Wyler’s camera placement respects the privacy of her personal pain. “It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair,” she sobs, and she is right. The film is much more sensitive than the novel about the unfairness of social and sexual mores in a patriarchal society, where for the older man, an active and indeed sexual life can be just about to restart whereas for his younger wife, even with money, similar opportunities are not to be found or countenanced, and her future from that moment on is effectively sealed. Quickly dismissing Kurt when she recognizes that he will never go against the wishes of his mother and the baroness will never change, Fran moves over to the phone. As she puts in a long-distance call to her husband, Wyler pans left to the window where snow is falling in Vienna before dissolving to a sunny day in the bay of Naples. The transition is not simply one of place but of mood, initially reflecting Fran’s anticipation of rescue from the chill of what has gone before but quickly suggesting also a false dawn of expectation, for her husband’s change has gone further than simply location. The telephone will be the main protagonist of the next sequence. It will carry the same

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tension, and be given the same visual prominence, as a loaded gun, and Wyler will organize the movement of his characters around the sight and sound of this object as if he were directing a thriller. There are three calls of gathering urgency, as the shrill sound progressively undercuts the revelation of Sam’s new-found vitality as he fixes an outboard motor to a neighbor’s sailboat and tells Edith of his plans for an airline between Seattle and Moscow that will involve them both, for they have fallen in love. The first call is taken by Edith’s Italian maid. Because she does not understand the language, she replaces the receiver before checking the purpose of the call and the identity of the caller. The second adds a more serious dimension because the maid tells Edith the call is from Vienna, and she suspects that Fran must be the caller and that she must be calling for a reason. The phone rings again as Edith tries to hustle Sam off the terrace and out of the way as she agrees to join him on his fishing trip; and he is just about to leave (in a shot similar to that other fateful moment when Edith was about to leave the American Express office) when again his name “Dodsworth” is called out, this time by the maid, and his direction and that of the narrative are reversed when he is told the call is from Vienna. At that moment Wyler does something unexpected, but absolutely right, and in a manner that anticipates and maybe even influences a similar strategy by Alfred Hitchcock in Rear Window (1954), when the hero takes a phone call at a key moment and realizes that the caller at the other end of the line is the last person in the world he wants to hear from at that point: the sound suddenly dips, isolating the hero in his own thoughts as his heart drops to his boots. Sam’s face is in shadow (we can read his mood from that image alone) and Edith in the background as he takes the call from Fran and agrees to return with her to America. Edith sees it as a perverse denial of a chance of happiness, for himself as well as for her, and he agrees but feels at that stage he has no choice and owes her his loyalty. “I’ve got to take care of her,” he tells Edith. “A man’s habits get pretty strong in 20 years.” It is the scene on the boat that marks the decisive break. Fran’s brisk manner seems not that different from that of her behavior at the station, though we have learned by now that incessant chatter from her is usually a mask for nervousness. Clearly, however, from her perspective, nothing much has changed. Indeed, the scene starts to replay some of the earlier moments in the film, though with darker variations. When Fran complains about the draft from the saloon door, one is reminded of the open door that heralded Captain Lockert’s first entry in the film, which was the start of trouble to come. When she starts to run down Kurt and his mother, Sam interrupts with the single word “Don’t”— it is an abrupt recollection of the same word that Edith Cortright used all those months ago when Fran was in danger of overstepping the marks of propriety. As the scene continues and Fran chatters on, Wyler boldly delays the anticipated reaction and holds the shot of the back of Sam’s head at the right hand side of the frame for what seems an uncommonly long time — long enough to make one feel uneasy, to begin to feel irritated by Fran’s incessant talk, to wonder what is going through his mind, and to sense that, even though motionless, Sam has in reality moved on. It is at the point when Fran says, “You were at fault too,” that Wyler delivers the close-up of Sam that he has withheld, his face fixed and determined as he rises, realizing that the gap between them has grown too wide and that he is returning to Naples. When Fran shouts that he will never get her out of his system, Sam slaps on his hat in a gesture that recalls their original departure from New York and replies, “Maybe not, but love has got to stop some place short of suicide!” David Mamet’s description of Fran’s reaction is particularly vivid here, a tribute from one fellow director to another: “Wyler has the finally vanquished shrew wife spew out her fury as the steamer bears her

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away and out of the hero’s life. We hear not her invective, but the scream of the ship’s steam whistle — an idea of which any director would say, ‘Well, that was a good day’s work’” (Mamet: 5). It is a marvelous idea, because as Fran shouts, “He’s gone ashore! He’s gone’s ashore!” the steam whistle both covers her cry, emphasizing her frustration, but paradoxically amplifies it, suggesting a rush of white-hot anger. Characteristically, though, Wyler does not end the scene there, but lingers with the character as she turns back, deflated and defeated. We see the sorrow behind the spite and, amidst the milling crowds, the loneliness of rejection. The reunion between Sam and Edith is another exceptionally felicitous piece of direction. Not the usual romantic embrace (indeed we have never seen them kiss); instead, Edith looks sadly out toward the steamship but then notices the motorboat sailing toward her. As it turns slightly in the water, the figure of Sam appears, waving at her. Alfred Newman’s beautiful main theme swells, and Edith returns the wave in what seems like an ecstasy of disbelief, then joy. Although the shot was carefully prepared, Mary Astor was astonished when Wyler filmed her reaction in a single take. “It’s good, you’ll see,” he told her, with what she referred to as “his evil grin,” and it was. As Astor wrote: “All that had previously occurred in the picture was back of the final fade-out of the story. There were cuts of Walter Huston. The audience knew, but they wanted to enjoy the reaction of the woman when she saw him.... At every theater, at every performance, the audience clapped their hands. It sounded like applause but it was sheer joy” (Astor: 125). She is right to draw attention to the film’s imaginative touch at the end in emphasizing Edith’s reaction over the hero’s to give the film that extra climactic sense of elation. Yet, as the end titles come up, the very last shot of the film is a long shot of the steamer alone on the ocean, perhaps Sam’s fleeting recollection of Fran on her way back to a forlorn future in Zenith, a Jamesian reflection (as he puts it in his preface to What Maisie Knew) that one’s person’s pleasure is often another person’s pain, and perhaps even an allusion to the very last sentence of the novel and its typical, slightly ominous, dying fall: “He was indeed so confidently happy that he completely forgot Fran and he did not again yearn for her, for almost two days.” It is a fittingly rich and rounded climax to an extraordinary film, mature and compassionate in its observation of middle-aged travails, the moral and cultural differences between America and Europe, the different social and sexual values of male and female and the inequities and injustices that thereby arise, and the choices and mistakes people make in their life as they search for fulfillment. Suddenly, with one bound, Wyler had demonstrated the potential to jump to the forefront of American cinema and to be placed alongside contemporary giants such as Frank Capra and John Ford.

Come and Get It (1936) The directing credit on this film reads “Directed by Howard Hawks and William Wyler,” and thereby hangs a tale. After the success of Barbary Coast (1935), Hawks had been hired again by Goldwyn to make a film version of Edna Ferber’s novel, Come and Get It, while Wyler was engaged on Dodsworth. When he looked at the assembled footage of both films, Goldwyn was pleased with Dodsworth, which was nearing completion, but appalled by what he watched of Come and Get It, because Hawks seemed to be departing from the original script, including a lot of improvisation, and turning it into what we now recognize as a typical Hawks movie about two friends and a feisty heroine. After a furious argument between the two, Hawks walked off the picture at more or less the same time as

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Goldwyn fired him. Goldwyn then invited Wyler to his home for the first time and asked him to take over the direction, perhaps remembering Wyler’s earlier Edna Ferber adaptation, Glamour (1934), which had been a modest success. When Wyler refused to take over another man’s picture, Goldwyn rose from his sickbed (he had recently had a gall bladder operation and his appendix removed) and rushed at Wyler in such a fury that Goldwyn’s wife, Frances, had to restrain her husband by slapping his legs with a fly-swatter while Wyler fled from the house. In checking later with his lawyer, Wyler found that Goldwyn contractually had the power to compel him to do the film, so he reluctantly complied, though subsequently refusing to claim any credit for the film (he was horrified when Goldwyn wanted to give him a solo directing credit) and always saying the best parts of it were directed by Hawks. Ironically, the film was to receive good reviews and perform better at the box office than Dodsworth. Who directed what has since been a subject of some critical debate. It is agreed that the final part of the film was directed by Wyler, but whereas critics like John Baxter and Robin Wood have suggested he directed only the last few minutes, his regular editor at this time, Daniel Mandell (although he did not edit Come and Get It) was of the opinion that Wyler had directed more than half (Herman: 162). A study of the production notes does suggest that Mandell’s was the more accurate surmise, because Hawks is credited with shooting 4,033 feet of film to Wyler’s 4,205, with Richard Rosson credited for 473 feet for the lumberjack sequences. Indeed, unlike Robin Wood who, in his 1968 book on Howard Hawks, was prepared to stake his life on the claim that Hawks directed the candy-making scene between Joel McCrea and Frances Farmer, it looks to me more like a scene from Wyler, having something of the relaxed intimacy of the early scenes between McCrea and Merle Oberon in These Three, and recalling Wyler particularly in its use of close-up toward the end of the scene to suggest a sudden quickening of emotion between the two, and a realization of mutual attraction. In broad terms it seems that Hawks directed the first half of the film and Wyler the second; and aspects of the film’s narrative structure, tone, and theme would tend to bear that out. The story begins in 1884. The tough boss of a lumber camp, Barney Glasgow (Edward Arnold), has ambitions to become one of the wealthiest men in Wisconsin. In spite of falling in love with a saloon-bar singer, Lotta (Frances Farmer), he abandons her in order to fulfill his ambition and marries the daughter of a timber tycoon. Brokenhearted, Lotta marries Barney’s best friend, Swan (Walter Brennan), who is in love with her, and they will have a daughter, also called Lotta and also played by Frances Farmer. After a passage of over twenty years (during which Swan’s wife has died), Barney, who is now prosperous and powerful, is persuaded by his daughter Evvie (Andrea Leeds) to visit his old friend. On being introduced to the young Lotta, Barney is immediately struck by her likeness to her mother and, stirred by old memories, he invites her, Swan and Swan’s niece, Karie (Mady Christians), to return home with him. Ostensibly, this generous gesture is for the benefit of the whole family, but the real reason is that Barney is smitten with Lotta. Conflict arises when his motives become apparent not only to Lotta and Karie but to his family and his work colleagues. And it flares into violence when Lotta finds herself falling in love with Barney’s son, Richard (McCrea). Most of the physical action takes place in the first half of the film, and is the work of Hawks, culminating in a spectacular saloon brawl where Barney and Swan, with the aid of Lotta, vanquish their opponents by hurling metal tin trays. (When Barney returns to visit Swan after many years, one of the first things he notices is a tin tray displayed on the wall

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as a souvenir of that night.) There are aspects of the narrative — the hardening inhumanity of the hero, the conflict between father and son, a final hand-to-hand fight between the two that will be halted by the heroine’s intervention — that anticipate Hawks’s Red River (1948). Some use of overlapping dialogue and the inclusion of a song for the heroine (“Aura Lee”) also have the Hawks imprint. This part of the film is enlivened by exciting documentary footage of lumbering by Richard Rosson, which gives a sense of the drive, danger, and excitement of Barney’s business enterprise. The film’s second half looks and feels more like Wyler, as the action moves more to interior rather than exterior settings and to the psychological more than the physical. There is a Wyler-like scene of social embarrassment when Barney takes his friends into a diningcar on the train to Chicago and the young Lotta becomes conscious of the other passengers looking at her and is made to feel self-conscious about the way she is dressed. “I’ll never be able to fit in with people like that,” she says, and Barney resolves to take matters into his own hands. When they are next seen, arriving together at a luxurious Chicago restaurant, a panning shot along the diners shows heads turning in clear admiration. Wyler then isolates the dramatic core of the scene with carefully chosen close-ups and reaction shots. Ostensibly, the scene concerns Barney’s plans for the future of Swan and his family and his delight in helping them, but the director’s attention to close detail (the close-up of Barney’s hand on Lotta’s gloved hand and the reaction shot of Karie as she notices this) gives the scene an extra twist, pointing up Lotta’s awareness of his effusive attention and Karie’s disquiet about Barney’s true motives, which he might not even realize himself. Thematically, if Hawks’s part of the film anticipates Red River, Wyler’s part seems to look back to A House Divided (father and son in conflict over the same woman) and for ward to Carrie, where an older married man falls head over heels in love with a younger woman and contrives to place her in a compromising situation to satisfy his own desires. Here Barney will propose that Lotta might live in Chicago on her own at his expense, but be visited and entertained by him at regular intervals. The implications of this are unmistakable. Perhaps most of all, though, the film looks forward to The Little Foxes in its portrayal of the kind of business ruthlessness that selfishly exploits the people and the land. For Edna Ferber, the main theme of her novel was “the rape of America ... the destruction of forests and rivers by the wholesale robber barons of the day” (Berg: 275). One could not describe this as the main theme of the film, which is essentially a romantic melodrama, but it is a concern that surfaces from time to time. It is a prime source of conflict between Barney and his son, who accuses his father of ecological devastation: ravaging a country for its timber but putting nothing back in terms of replanting. (Indeed, one could see a connection between the ecological and emotional themes of the film here, Barney’s failure to replant for the future becoming a metaphor and omen of his subsequent romantic failure with the young Lotta.) As in The Little Foxes, the film will end not simply with a young couple leaving their elders to start a new life but also rejecting their values. The final sequence brings things to a head and is the most powerful and sustained part of the film. Barney is hosting a lavish party for his employees at the mill. Wyler allows himself a touch of humor at the outset. The conductor of the Glasgow Mills Employees’ Band leads his amateur players with the pomp and passion of a Toscanini. The arrival of Barney’s lugubrious secretary, Josie (a beautifully droll performance by Cecil Cunningham), is treated with mock gravity. As she has done at the office, Josie keeps her own counsel but misses nothing of what is going on, and is in the habit of pausing at an open door and then

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giving a silent and significant look back at her employer before exiting, as if she knows something she should not. She does that same look here when she passes Barney on the stairs as he is searching for Lotta: it is a portent of his disillusionment. Rather like Walter Huston’s patriarch in a similar situation in A House Divided, Barney opens the door to a dimly lit room and is confronted by his worst imaginings: in this case, his son and Lotta together and in an embrace. A striking shot of him in the shadow atmospherically conveys his dark mood but also conveys a sudden sense of diminution of potency, for up until then Barney has always seemed to dominate the frame. As in A House Divided, a fight breaks out between father and son, but here Lotta comes between them, shouting to Richard, “He’s your father, he’s an old man!”— a cry that brings Barney up short. Angrily, he orders them out of the house. In a disheveled state, he meets up with his wife (Mary Nash) on the stairs and, in the most touching scene between them in the film, she tidies him up while quietly revealing that she knew what was going on all along. She is relieved that it is their son and not Barney who is running off with Lotta. “But then,” she says tellingly to her husband, “perhaps even you can’t have everything you want.” To emphasize the parallel with Red River in his book on Hawks, Robin Wood described the ending as follows: “The girl intervenes in the fight between father and son, and her presence is responsible for bringing the father to his senses, making him realize his love for his son, and leading him to accept the young people’s marriage” (Wood: 120). From a Wyler perspective, however, the ending looks much more equivocal, and even similar to the finale of The Little Foxes in its shot of a parental figure whose material needs have been amply satisfied but who seems stranded in a personal void (Bette Davis behind a curtain in complete shadow, Edward Arnold seen through a chuck wagon’s triangle, as if reminding us of his ignominious status as the weak point of a love triangle). Contrary to Wood’s assertion, there is no sign that he realizes his love for his son (his very last comment regarding Richard is “that precious son of yours,” when he tells his wife of Richard’s elopement with Lotta). Indeed, as in The Little Foxes, the young couple leave hurriedly without a single look back. Moreover, as his daughter has told him of her decision to marry for love rather than money, at the end his values have been comprehensively rejected by both of his children. It is worth giving a final word of praise to the three principals. Walter Brennan won the first of his three best supporting actor Oscars for his endearing portrayal of Swan (it was the first time an Oscar had been given in that category). In her harrowing memoir, Will There Really Be a Morning?, Frances Farmer wrote that she found the role of the saloon girl Lotta more challenging and interesting to play than the comparatively innocent daughter, but she is still radiant in both roles, and this is the performance more than any other that gives a sense of the star she might have become. In contrast to Farmer, Edward Arnold seems to me better in the second half of the film. Goldwyn’s original preference for the role was Spencer Tracy, who could not be released from his M-G-M contract, and Arnold looks unconvincing in the fight scenes Hawks has contrived for him. He seems much more comfortable in the role of businessman, preparing for future classic performances for Capra, and is rather moving in the last scene. He has come to his senses, as Wood says, but also with an awareness of what he has lost. When he rings the chuck wagon triangle and shouts “Come and get it!” in the way he used to when summoning his lumberjacks for their meals, he is in tears and close to hysteria. At this point what we are seeing is not a man reconciled to his lot but a man’s recollection of an earlier, happier time.

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Dead End (1937) Describing Dead End as “one of the best pictures of the year,” Graham Greene began his review of the film in Night and Day (November 25, 1937) with an evocative description of its setting. “The slum street comes to a dead end on the river-bank,” he wrote, “luxury flats have gone up where the slum frontage has been cleared, so that two extremes of the social scale are within catcall: the Judge’s brother’s son has breakfast with his governess on a balcony in sight of the juvenile gang on the waterside” (Greene: 180). Greene’s introduction is shrewd because it immediately establishes that the setting is not simply background but a metaphoric statement of its main themes: the divide between rich and poor, where the former literally look down on the latter; and the impact of environment on character and social opportunity. “What chance have they got in a place like this?” the architect-hero Dave ( Joel McCrea) will say later when musing about the future of the youngsters in the neighborhood. “Enemies of society, it says in the papers. Why not?” If this is all that society has to offer, who would not be its enemy? As in the Broadway production of Sidney Kingsley’s play, which had opened in October 1935 and ran for over a year, the star of the film is the set. Richard Day’s remarkable design might stylize the squalor, but the visual concept behind it is that of a labyrinthine trap that confirms the division between the haves and the have-nots, and the difficulty of escaping or rising above one’s surroundings. Wyler had clashed with Goldwyn because he wanted to shoot the film on actual locations in New York whereas Goldwyn insisted on its being filmed in a studio where he could keep an eye on things. (This gave rise to one of his more famous Goldwynisms where he is alleged to have complained that the set looked “dirty” and Wyler had to point out that dirt was one of the more prominent characteristics of a typical slum.) In an interview with Gene D. Phillips, Wyler was to say later that the set “looked very artificial and phony to me” (Phillips: 7), but, given his skill at adapting plays for the screen and the tight dramatic construction of the original, one could argue that the theatricality of the film actually works in its favor. An authentic locale might have been jarring if set against the tight 24-hour structure and the theatrical dialogue. What we have is not a realistic drama but a stylized social polemic, making a plea (and a successful one) for liberal reform in the era of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, and an impassioned declaration of poverty and deprivation as the root cause of crime. In this regard, the film is in sharp contrast to another famous film of the period in which the Dead End kids (Bobby Jordan, Huntz Hall, Billy Halop, Leo Gorcey, Bernard Punsley, and Gabriel Dell) were to appear, Michael Curtiz’s Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), where, in Colin McArthur’s words, the drift into crime is “the result of moral choice rather than social conditioning” (McArthur: 39). In their later years on film, they would be tamed and made respectable and go under the name of the Bowery Boys, but in Dead End, they are still unruly, antisocial, and potentially criminal. When they beat up the rich boy on the block and the father comes to his son’s aid, Tommy (Billy Halop) stabs the man in the hand and has to go on the run. What unites the Dead End Kids with the other poor people in their neighborhood, notably a struggling architect, Dave, and Tommy’s sister Drina (Sylvia Sidney), is a frustration with their situation, which seems to offer no prospect of change or advancement. They are equally united in what seems a wholly justified hostility toward the police, who complain of a lack of cooperation among the local community but who are shown as unsympathetic agents of repression. In the very first scene we see a tramp being rudely harassed and driven off a bench by a patrolling policeman; and throughout the film, the police are

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depicted as stupid (they fail to recognize a dangerous gangster under their noses) and aggressive in their oppression of the underprivileged and needy. One of the film’s biggest visual shocks is the moment when Drina, justifying her distrust of the police, removes her hat to disclose a massive bruise on her forehead, inflicted by a police baton during her strike action earlier in the day for decent wages. What separates the Dead End kids from someone like Dave, however, is their respective attitude to the gangster in their midst, Baby Face Martin (Humphrey Bogart), who has been brought up in these slums but who got out through a life of crime. Martin is now making a sentimental return to his roots to visit his mother (Marjorie Main) and see his former girlfriend, Francey (Claire Trevor). As an architect, Dave’s solution to the problem of delinquency would be to pull down the slums and build a better environment that would foster opportunity and social mobility, and cease to be a breeding ground for people like Martin, whose development into a hardened criminal should act as a cautionary tale. For the kids, though, Martin is a hero who knows the score. He can offer tips on the most lethal way of using a knife or gaining an advantage over a rival gang, but who also demonstrates by example that there is a route out of this poverty, albeit a dangerous and violent one. More than the architect, the gangster seems their adult guide to the future. “See this shirt?” Martin says to Dave. “Silk, 20 bucks. See this suit? Custom-tailored, 150 bucks.” Like all classic gangster heroes, Martin preens on his appearance, which becomes a badge of his new prosperity and heightened status. At points like these, Bogart invests the role with a kind of insolent charm in what was probably his finest supporting performance before High Sierra (1940) and The Maltese Falcon (1941) established him as a leading male star. (One can only be grateful that George Raft turned down the role and think of Billy Wilder’s typically acerbic comment when Raft similarly refused the role of the insurance man tempted into murder in the 1944 film noir classic, Double Indemnity: “When George Raft turned it down, we knew we had a good picture.”) Bogart is at his finest, however, in the two great rejection scenes that are the most memorable in the film. His reunion with his mother (Marjorie Main) at the bottom of a gloomy stairwell reverberates with pain and anger on both sides, with the shadows deepening the mood of gloom, hardly any eye contact shared between mother and son, and Main’s voice a droning monotone that swells and quivers from a sense of shame at someone she has once raised and loved. The disillusionment is completed when Martin meets up again with his former girlfriend, who has slipped into prostitution in order to survive. In the play the character has syphilis, but although this has necessarily been toned down for the film, the scene is scripted by Lillian Hellman in such a way that no audience could miss the significance of what has happened to Francey any more that it can escape Martin’s notice. “I’m tired, I’m sick,” she says, “Can’t you see it? Look at me good. You’ve been looking at me the way I used to be.” At that moment she steps into the light, stripping away the last veil of his illusions. As the screenplay puts it: “The nostalgic dream is finished.” Bogart’s powerful projection of the depth of Martin’s disillusionment (his body momentarily seems to emit a spasm of disgust as she departs) is matched by Claire Trevor’s equally anguished rendering of Francey’s despair and her grim recognition of the inescapable reality of her situation. As she wanders away the hollow, honky-tonk strains of “Girl of My Dreams” are heard coming from a nearby café jukebox, a mocking and melancholy coda to what has taken place. “Twice in one day,” moans Martin bitterly as he sits in the café with his sidekick Hunk (Allen Jenkins) and reflects on the shattered dreams of his homecoming. “That’s what I came back for, what I took a chance for....” Almost in retaliation he begins to outline to a

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reluctant Hunk a plan to get something out of this visit by kidnapping the rich man’s son and demanding a ransom. The camera edges toward the two men in a close-up profile while, in the background of the shot and through the window, we can see a woman wheeling a baby carriage across the street. She is too far away to be in focus and the blurry image of mother and child seems to approximate in symbolic form the idea that is shaping in Martin’s mind. It is an exciting example of the kind of interaction between foreground and background in a single frame (and the heightened demands it makes on an audience’s alertness) that the cameraman Gregg Toland will develop in his future collaborations with Wyler, notably in The Best Years of Our Lives, as well as anticipating some of the virtuoso effects he was to achieve in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). In fact, the kidnapping plan goes awry when Dave confronts Martin and threatens to go to the police, at which point a melodramatic but undeniably exciting shoot-out develops. This is superbly photographed by Toland in shadowy doorways and alleys, and finally through the bars of a fire escape on which Martin is shot by Dave and falls to his death, perishing in the end in the slum dwellings that he had spent all his adult life trying to escape. In the play, the architect informs on Martin to the police but in the film he is given a more active (if less probable) role. Still, Lillian Hellman’s skillful adaptation undercuts the heroics. When he learns that he will receive a handsome reward for shooting Martin, Dave responds dully, “They pay you for it, huh?” No sense of triumph here, and indeed Dave seems to sense an irony in being complimented for what is being condemned in Martin: the financial gain accruing from a killing. In fact, there is a double irony here. Dave resolves to use the reward money to procure the best lawyer for Drina’s now genuinely repentant brother Tommy, so that the kid has the chance of a new beginning. Paradoxically, Dave’s use of the reward money in this way thwarts his own escape from this environment. There seems something almost fatalistic in his rejection of an alternative world with the wealthy Kate (Wendy Barrie), who loves him, in favor of a commitment to Drina, for whom every day is a battle and whose description of a possible escape turns out to be a complete fantasy. At the conclusion, the kids sing a song learned from a friend in reform school: “If I had the wings of an angel, over these prison walls I would fly,” but there is no real sense that things are going to immediately improve. The camera simply reverses its opening movement as if to bring things full circle and reinforce the sense of a dead end with no escape unless some form of attention is paid through the agency of urgent political and social intervention. In his entertaining autobiographical recollection of the filmgoing experience of his youth, The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin pinpointed what he felt from his own experience were some of the false notes of Dead End: its pious architect; its prim and pitying heroine, for example, but, he added, “as for the gangster, his broken mother and his broken girl — yes, I had seen that” (Baldwin: 26). Although played with skill and sincerity by Joel McCrea and Sylvia Sidney, Dave and Drina seem rather routinely conceived and catch the imagination much less than the figure of Martin, all of whose scenes are excitingly dramatized, with the result that the film sags after Martin’s death. There is some softening of the original play, and characterization and theme — the straightforward linkage between poverty and crime — seem a bit schematic. Nevertheless, at the time the film brought a new dimension of sociology to the classic gangster movie; bravely attempted an unusual authenticity in its observation of the codes and rituals of the teenage gang; and offered a trenchant dissection of class envy and conflict in American society that was to become one of Wyler’s future key

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concerns. If it now looks old-fashioned, that could be seen as a compliment as well as a criticism, for what dates it is the kind of social conscience and consciousness that has virtually disappeared from the heart of mainstream Hollywood film.

Wuthering Heights (1939) One Goldwyn story about Wuthering Heights alleges that, when Goldwyn was asked if he had ever read the Emily Brontë novel, he replied: “I read half of it all the way through.” In this he is probably not alone, for the first half of the novel, which deals with the tragic love story of Heathcliff and Cathy set against the wild Yorkshire moors of the late 18th and early 19th century, is far better known than the second half, in which, after Cathy’s death, a haunted and embittered Heathcliff takes revenge on the succeeding generations of the people who have harmed him. The screen adaptation by Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur (with script suggestions offered at a later stage by an uncredited John Huston) updates the action to the Victorian period and stops at the point of Cathy’s death, save for the opening and the epilogue. To begin with, ending the film on a death was a major disincentive to Goldwyn for making the film at all. In the final print, and to Wyler’s horror, Goldwyn supervised the insertion of a closing shot of two ghostly figures in the distance, clearly the spirits of Heathcliff and Cathy, reunited after death and roaming around their beloved spot on Penistone Crag. “It’s a horrible shot,” Wyler told Axel Madsen, “but nobody seems to mind very much” (Madsen: 187). In fairness, one could say that Goldwyn’s ending fortuitously has something of the calm-after-the-storm feeling of the conclusion of the novel, which he never finished. Voted by the New York Critics as the best film of 1939 over the claims of Gone with the Wind and others, it was later named by Goldwyn as his favorite among all of his productions. When a Goldwyn interviewer was unwise enough to begin a question with the words, “When Wyler made Wuthering Heights...,” he never got any further. “I made Wuthering Heights,” thundered Goldwyn, “Wyler only directed it.” The screenplay had been brought to Wyler’s attention by Sylvia Sidney when they were working together on Dead End. Producer Walter Wanger proposed that Sidney star in it opposite Charles Boyer, but, although she liked the script, she felt that she and Boyer were completely wrong for the roles. Wyler sold Goldwyn on the idea of purchasing the screenplay, but the producer made one proviso which was non-negotiable: that the role of Cathy should go to his contract star, Merle Oberon. Although correspondence suggests that Wyler’s preferred choice for the role would have been Katharine Hepburn, he came to believe that Oberon’s performance was the best of her career. He had sufficient confidence to allow her to play much of her deathbed scene in close-up and his confidence was amply repaid. There is a particularly touching moment when she sees Heathcliff at her bedside and momentarily shuts her eyes as if she fears she might be dreaming; Wyler was greatly impressed by her vocal performance in this scene. “She thought out something of her own ... a kind of death rattle in the voice,” he told Charles Higham, “it was very realistic” (Miller: 64). It was agreed that the other main parts should be played by British actors. Robert Newton was first considered for the role of Heathcliff and then, when Laurence Olivier was preferred at the suggestion of Ben Hecht, who remembered Olivier from the time he was due to play opposite Greta Garbo in Queen Christina (1932) but was replaced by John Gilbert, Newton was considered for the role of Hindley, but was unable to be released from

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Cathy and Heathcliff: Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights (1939).

his current contract. A young James Mason was also considered for the role of Hindley, but he insisted on script approval and his terms were deemed unacceptable, the part eventually going to Hugh Williams. Drafting a telegram response to Mason (that was never sent), Wyler had commented drily that “if you were looking for a sympathetic lead, there are no sympathetic parts in Wuthering Heights except for Isabella, which I cannot offer you.” He did offer the part of Isabella to Vivien Leigh, who by that time was Olivier’s romantic partner (though both were still married), and was rather surprised when she turned it down. In Catherine Wyler’s documentary, the director recalls his “deathless prediction” prior to Gone with the Wind when he told her, “Vivien, you’re not yet known in America and for a first part you’ll never get anything better than Isabella!” Ann Todd and Rene Ray were also considered for the role, before it went to Geraldine Fitzgerald, whose performance, Olivier thought, was to hold up better than anyone’s. Alastair Sim and John Laurie were in the

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running for the role of the house-servant Joseph, but that part was assigned to the everreliable Leo G. Carroll. The filming had its problems. Having been given a rough ride by Wyler in his small but important cameo in Dodsworth, David Niven was very reluctant to repeat the experience in Wuthering Heights, particularly as the part he was being offered, Edgar Linton, was distinctly unappealing. Linton, the thoroughly decent gentleman whom Cathy will marry when Heathcliff has run away in despair at Cathy’s contempt for his lowly situation, is essentially there to offer a pallid version of masculinity in contrast to Heathcliff ’s diabolical charisma. Even the script is demeaning, with Cathy at one stage, sticking up for Heathcliff against Linton’s snobbish disapproval, crying out that “I hate the look of your milk-white face, I hate the touch of your soft foolish hands!” Charmed by Wyler over lunch into accepting the assignment, Niven found the director on set to be every bit as ruthless and demanding as he had been during Dodsworth. Things came to a head when Wyler insisted that Niven sob during Cathy’s death scene and Niven was unable to do it, the eventual leakage of emotion coming from his nose rather than his eyes. Certainly if one is attending to Niven’s performance in this scene, the emotional temperature drops: he seems asleep more than distraught. He is at his most moving when Cathy’s insistence that his sister Isabella should not marry Heathcliff has a vehemence that suggests raw jealousy more than rank disapproval. Edgar says nothing but the close-up on Niven’s face eloquently conveys the character’s forlorn realization of an ancient fear that has lain festering in his subconscious: that his wife has really been in love all along with a man he hates. Wyler’s evolving relationship with Laurence Olivier has become something of a film legend. At first, Wyler’s main task was as a mediator between the actor and his co-star, Merle Oberon, who, although soulmates on screen, were anything but enamored of each other on the set. When Oberon objected to his inadvertently spitting on her during a love scene, Olivier (undoubtedly miserable at being separated from Vivien Leigh and feeling she would have made a better Cathy anyway) called her an amateur. Wyler insisted that he apologize. The main challenge was getting Olivier to scale down his performance for the screen, Wyler’s manner tending to be scathing rather than soothing in his endeavor to get what he wanted. When he pulled him up on one occasion for acting as if he were in the opera house in Manchester, Olivier’s peevish response was to suggest that the anemic medium of film was clearly not capable of appreciating the grandeur of his histrionic style. Wyler’s scornful laughter brought him up short. According to Olivier’s official biographer, Terry Coleman, Wyler proceeded to invite Olivier to his home and over dinner told him: “You are quite wrong to take this patronizing attitude about this medium. Let me tell you something I believe in with my heart and soul — this is the greatest medium ever invented. Don’t you sneer at me that nobody could do Shakespeare.... There’s nothing in literature ... that you can’t do successfully in this medium. All you’ve got to do is find out how” (Coleman: 107). It was a turning-point in their relationship. Thereafter Olivier was always to acknowledge Wyler as the director who taught him how to act for the cinema. There are moments when one senses the actor’s theatrical background — when he throws open the window and calls out in anguish to the dead Cathy, one can certainly understand why he was regarded as the definitive Romeo of his generation — and also scenes with Isabella where his ability to convey in a simple frown a character who can switch in an instant from charm to malevolence that seem to presage his Richard III. But it was the tortured romantic intensity of the performance that seemed to magnetize contemporary audiences. In her delightful autobiography, Among the Porcupines, Carol Matthau recalls seeing the film as a

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young girl and crying through three consecutive screenings, and being bowled over by Olivier’s depiction of the depths of passionate love. “It took hold of me in a way that nothing else I have ever seen or read has,” she wrote. “If life is not about passionate, poetic, celestial, incredulous, aching, thrilling, totally beautiful love, then life is not worth living” (Matthau: 2). The passage aims to catch the emotional effusiveness of herself as a young woman perhaps, but she also might have put her finger on an important aspect of the film’s enduring popularity. “Only a stranger lost in a storm would have dared to knock at the door of Wuthering Heights” reads an opening title, appropriately establishing a tone akin to horror and setting the psychological parameters of the film. One of the features of the narrative will be the close correlation between the wild natures of the two main protagonists and the convulsions in nature that their behavior seems either to echo or activate. The stranger Lockwood (Miles Mander) staggers into a household that is indeed as unwelcoming as imaginable. He is attacked by dogs. The room he enters is long, inducing agoraphobia more than a sense of intimacy. Dark shadows dominate the approach to the hearth, and James Basevi’s skilful art direction appropriately conjures up a dwelling that offers no sense of domestic warmth. As he approaches the hearth, Lockwood is silently scrutinized by the house’s inhabitants — Heathcliff, Isabella, Joseph, and the housekeeper Ellen (Flora Robson)— who seem as cold and inhospitable as their surroundings. Lockwood’s request for shelter is grudgingly accepted, but later that night, awakened from a troubled sleep and reaching out to close a shutter that is rattling against the window, he hears a voice calling and feels a cold hand touch his own. His cries rouse the household and he is thrown out of the room by a deranged Heathcliff, who throws open the window and howls in anguish into the darkness before rushing out into the storm. A frightened but curious Lockwood has heard the voice say the name “Cathy,” and Ellen now relates their story that began forty years ago. The childhood scenes are perfunctorily dispatched. Our attention is drawn to the Wuthering Heights of old, a markedly less gloomy place than the house we saw at the beginning. The generally static camera also conveys a placidness in contrast to the scenes prior to the flashback, where it was more restless, nervously projecting the atmosphere of a household not at peace with itself. Mr. Earnshaw (Cecil Kellaway) has returned home, with presents of a riding crop for his daughter Cathy and a violin for his son, Hindley (perhaps suggestive of a sensitivity to the boy’s nature, which is never really developed). Earnshaw has also brought with him a young lad who was wandering homeless in the streets of Liverpool, whose origins will remain a mystery, and who will be called Heathcliff. It is a gift from God, says Earnshaw, adding, “although it’s as dark as if he came from the Devil.” Cathy is initially disdainful (“He’s dirty,” she says) and Hindley is openly hostile, but Earnshaw insists to his children that “you must share what you have with others not as fortunate as yourself.” In time, Heathcliff and Cathy will become inseparable, often retreating to Penistone Crag, where they live out their romantic fantasies of a life together and which serves as a retreat from the pressures of the real world. Heathcliff and Hindley, however, become implacable enemies. After Earnshaw has died and Hindley has become master of Wuthering Heights, he degenerates as an adult into a hopeless drunk and treats Heathcliff as his servant with cruelty and contempt. In an incident from their childhood, Hindley demanded the use of Heathcliff ’s horse and, when Heathcliff has refused, threw a rock that knocked Heathcliff to the ground. “How can I pay him back?” the young Heathcliff muses as he struggles to his feet. Even Cathy is frightened by the look on his face. It is the first

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stirring of Heathcliff as avenger of the wrongs and slights he has incurred in childhood, and it will become a dominant motivating force as he grows older. In Cathy’s case, a crucial moment in her life occurs later. When she and the now grown-up Heathcliff sneak into the grounds at Thrushcross Grange to spy on a party taking place at the Lintons,’ they are attacked by the household dogs. Cathy’s injuries necessitate an enforced stay in the Linton household, during which Edgar falls in love with her, while Heathcliff utters a curse on the house before he is hustled away. Prior to the dogs’ attack, Wyler has given particular prominence to a shot of the couple staring in at the window and with contrasting expressions — Heathcliff slightly mocking, Cathy entranced. Parenthetically, one might note that window shots recur quite frequently in the film, marking a significant division not simply between internal and external but between the domestic and the natural, between worldliness and wilderness. In the shot mentioned, the window bars both cut them off from the world they see but also allude to the way Cathy will be imprisoned by this vision of social grandness. She and Heathcliff have had daydreams about a life of finery and splendor while together on the Crag, but, in her relationship with Edgar, Cathy takes her fantasy world into reality, aligning herself with prosperous respectability, cutting herself off from Heathcliff, whom she now sees as an inferior. This causes a split in her own character that she is never able to reconcile. The duality in Cathy’s nature is particularly evident when Cathy tells Ellen that Edgar has proposed marriage, not knowing that Heathcliff is outside in the rain and overhearing the conversation. There is a brilliantly composed shot where we see Heathcliff hiding in darkness by the open door on one side of the screen, while on the other, Cathy is telling Ellen of her engagement. The effect is almost split-screen: on one side, darkness, the exterior, a storm; on the other, light, the interior, tranquility. It is a visual metaphor for Cathy’s own psyche and the conflict in the darkest recesses of her mind, between her surface desires and her true feelings. When she says, “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now,” he moves away and does not hear the rest of Cathy’s statement where she affirms the mystical bond between them. Her famous declaration, “I am Heathcliff ” is spoken as she is standing with her back to the window, and the declaration is underlined, by a loud crack of thunder and lightning, as if nature is amplifying and answering her cry: the sense is given of a unison between the storm raging outside and the emotional storm raging within. It is a moment that encapsulates a tension that is at the heart of the film: the struggle to live according to the dictates of one’s own nature and the conventions, proprieties, prejudices, and restraints of civilization that prevent one from doing so and which in turn will distort that nature into denials or perversions of self. Virtue becomes a mask for weakness and love is twisted into revenge. In a brief scene that is not in the novel, we see the wedding between Edgar and Cathy, or at least are given a shot of the couple as they leave the church. It is an intriguingly unemphatic shot, with the camera behind the villagers standing at the gate and who almost obscure a view of the bride. Romantic restraint rather than rapture seems to be the order of the day. A small child runs forward and gives some white heather to the bride for luck, but the effect is the contrary of what is intended, for Cathy shivers, as if subliminally remembering that heather brings associations of Heathcliff and the time together at Penistone Crag when he has gathered heather for her. “A cold wind went across my heart just then,” she tells Edgar, who has noticed her sudden pensiveness, “a feeling of doom. You touched me and it was gone.” She goes on, “Oh Edgar, I love you, I do,” the forced insistence seeming as much an endeavor to reassure herself as her husband and banish lingering shadows from her mind.

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The following sequence of Heathcliff ’s return shows the partnership of Wyler and Olivier at its finest. The wedding scene has ended on a close shot of Ellen, who has shared Cathy’s shiver of unease, but then the scene has faded to black, as she narrates that, as the years pass (and the film is noticeably unspecific about time), Cathy seems to settle happily into her life at the Grange. When the scene fades up again over this narration, the wind is howling and the camera prowls in the darkness over the house gates before closing in on the window, as it did when the young Heathcliff and Cathy broke into the grounds to spy on the inhabitants of the house all those years ago. The similarity of the shot cannot help but evoke a memory of that earlier scene, and a suggestion that someone is outside the window and spying again on the inhabitants within. What we see is a paradigm (one might almost say, parody) of genteel contentment: Isabella practicing on the harpsichord; Edgar playing chess with his half-asleep father; and Cathy nearing the completion of her embroidery of an angelic figure that seems to symbolize the docile heaven she has found and which, in that earlier conversation with Ellen on the night of Heathcliff ’s departure, she had thought is a place in which she did not belong. Yet the barking of the dogs (another reminder of the earlier scene) warns that an intruder is outside and might threaten this paradise. Ellen, who has gone to investigate the commotion, enters and whispers to Cathy that someone wishes to see her. “You sound as if it were a ghost,” says Cathy, to which Ellen replies, “It is ... he’s come back.” In the novel, the news of Heathcliff ’s return has been greeted by Cathy with delirious excitement, but in the film, her reaction is one of profound disquiet, the heroine feeling again the chill that she has felt at her wedding, and once more needing Edgar’s reassurance. Overriding her initial reluctance to see him and confident that he and his wife have nothing to fear from this specter out of the past, Edgar gives permission for Heathcliff to enter. One of Gregg Toland’s most striking depth of-focus compositions shows Heathcliff ’s entrance at the back of the room. The camera is motionless as he walks purposefully forward to meet the Lintons, who are viewing his approach with varying degrees of curiosity. The suspense is palpable, one of those dramatic moments in Wyler (like Bette Davis’s appearance before Henry Fonda in her white dress in Jezebel ) where one almost subconsciously finds oneself holding one’s breath. From Cathy’s perspective, Heathcliff ’s approach could resemble a long-forgotten nightmare returning to the forefront of her consciousness. In his book on Olivier, Roger Lewis called this “one of the great moments in movies,” adding that “Olivier is the natural aristocrat, and he holds the scene, the power of his reticence and the urgency of his love giving its measure” (Lewis: 210). It is probably the first time where one genuinely gets a sense of Olivier’s greatness as a film actor. Unspoken tension and powerful emotion quiver under the surface, but what is particularly striking about Olivier’s performance here is the velvety insolence of manner, so discreet as to be barely detectable, and the subtlety of his dialogue delivery. Even his slightly self-conscious pronunciation of the simple word “somewhat” resonates intriguingly as the speech of a man in unfamiliar social surroundings but rather luxuriating in it; it is a word that the young Heathcliff, one feels, would never have used. “I remember this room,” says Heathcliff, standing in the very spot where he cursed its inhabitants all those years ago. Olivier gives the recollection a faintly menacing undertone. When Edgar asks him about his change of fortune, Heathcliff proffers a droll answer about his ancestry, saying he remembered how his father was an Emperor of China and his mother an Indian princess and he had therefore simply claimed his inheritance. Provocatively prefacing the statement with the phrase, “The truth is....,” Olivier delivers the line with an ironic gravity that leaves the questioner completely nonplussed, but Wyler’s

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low angle shot of Cathy’s profile in the foreground of the shot during Heathcliff ’s explanation shows to whom the remark is really directed. She turns away tight-lipped and stares into space, as if picking up not only his allusion to the games they played together as children, but his sardonic tone that suggests that this visit might be less innocent than it seems. For all the surface social etiquette, there is — as suggested by Heathcliff ’s pinpricks of sarcasm — the sense of someone having returned to revive old memories and pay back old scores. The point is reinforced when Heathcliff now takes control of the screen space, moving to the foreground of the frame and then, unbidden, sitting down. With all eyes upon him, he reveals that he is the new owner of Wuthering Heights, having bought it under the nose of a drunken Hindley while paying off all his drinking and gambling debts. Edgar is at first confused and then outraged by this account of underhand behavior. Heathcliff is on the point of leaving when Cathy, who until now has avoided his gaze, calls him back to tell him, very formally, that he will be a welcome guest in the house but only if he has relinquished all the old bitterness. “Thank you,” he replies, and then adds: “It occurs to me that I have not congratulated you on your marriage. I have often thought of it.” Olivier’s delivery of that second sentence — quieter than the first, in a tone that seems to carry with it simultaneous reverberations of gladness, heartbreak, and threat — is the kind of acting that can make the temperature of a room change. Rarely can an expression of congratulation have been charged with a greater sense of fathomless sorrow. As Heathcliff departs, Wyler cuts back to the Lintons in a stance that defines them all after this dramatic interruption: Edgar and Cathy together, but not quite in a line; Isabella to one side, staring disapprovingly at them for what she sees as the rudeness of their behavior. Reversing with satisfying symmetry the opening shot of the sequence, the camera now pulls away from the window and into a stormy night, the sound of the wind seeming like a deep exhalation of breath after Heathcliff ’s departure, while also echoing the turbulence he has caused, and anticipating the storms to come. A later scene with the same setting is almost as fine. There is a ball at Thrushcross Grange and Wyler and Toland indulge in some virtuoso camerawork to convey the lavishness and gaiety of the occasion, the dancers first caught in a reflection in an ornate mirror, the camera gliding across the dance floor before reversing and swooping over the heads of the musicians before moving into the hallway to show some smartly dressed children imitating the dancing of the adults. Looking on from the stairs, Ellen smiles at the display of elegant high spirits, at which point the camera pauses in its graceful movement in the hallway; and the smile will leave Ellen’s face. The door opens and Heathcliff enters. Seeing her on the stairs, he greets Ellen in a manner more formal than friendly, no doubt sensing her discomfort at his unexpected appearance. It is not clear how long it has been since his first visit to the Grange on his return, but there is a noticeable difference in him. If in the earlier scene there had been a touch of hesitancy and deference in his manner, now he has acquired the arrogance and self-confidence that go with his changed station in life. He hands his hat and cloak to the servants with barely a look at the underlings in question. The camera is behind him as he stands in the middle of the frame surveying the dancing, a dark column of stillness amidst the joyous movement. Isabella rushes to greet him, for it is she who has invited him, on the strength of a visit of hers to Wuthering Heights where he has seen through her excuse of having a lame horse that needed attention, and mesmerized her with his perception of her loneliness and the possible kinship between them because of that. She whispers to him that he can hold her hand secretly under her fan when they sit down, but her plan is dashed when a woman guest sits next to her. Heathcliff has to stand behind her, as a harpsichordist

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Madame Ehlers entertains the guests with a rendition of Mozart’s Turkish Rondo (by repute, the first time a harpsichord had been heard over a Hollywood film soundtrack). It is during the performance, and without anything being said, that the real reason for Heathcliff ’s visit becomes apparent. The object of his attention is not Isabella but Cathy. He stares across the room and, even more than in the previous scene between them, looks convey far more than words. Such is the intensity of his gaze that Cathy becomes aware of it even though they are sitting at opposite ends of the room. Her dismay and discomfiture at his presence are only heightened when she notices Isabella’s evident delight in his company. Merle Oberon is very eloquent in her close-ups here, silently conveying all the necessary anxiety and apprehension of the character while the recital continues in the background. Indeed, the intercut shot of the harpsichordist’s hands as the music clatters to its climax seems, through Oberon’s acting, to become a correlative to Cathy’s jangling nerves. When the performance stops and Isabella is snapped up by another admirer before she can waltz with Heathcliff, he loses no time in crossing to Cathy, who becomes aware of his presence behind her without needing to turn round. She agrees to Heathcliff ’s suggestion that they talk on the veranda, but the conversation soon takes an uncomfortable turn when her suggestion, “Don’t pretend life hasn’t improved for you” receives the response, “Life has ended for me.” She realizes that Heathcliff ’s devotion to her is as complete as ever. The veranda setting suddenly becomes very expressive, standing midway between the civilized world of the Lintons, which Cathy has joined, and the tempestuous world outside, which might be closer to her real nature. It is one of the most powerful scenes in the film in its depiction of the forces that batter at Cathy’s existence, where social status and esteem can only be achieved at the cost of frustrated love. For all Cathy’s denials, Heathcliff ’s insistence that her life at the Grange is a lie strikes home, and she rushes back into the house. As she does so, Heathcliff is joined on the veranda by Isabella, requesting that he joins her for a dance that is perhaps a little more respectable than a waltz and, as she puts it playfully, “quite suitable for your high moral character.” At that, Heathcliff looks at her with an expression that Olivier seems miraculously to pitch midway between a mocking smile and a sadistic scowl: It would chill the blood of all but someone who was, alas, blinded by love. As they return to the dancing, we become aware of the anxious moaning of the wind. The camera pulls away into the prevailing darkness, as if scenting disaster. The camera’s prescience of impending doom will be vindicated as the narrative develops to its climax. Heathcliff will marry Isabella out of jealousy and spite, and the marriage for the young woman will become a living hell. Geraldine Fitzgerald is particularly fine in these later scenes where we see the toll the marriage has taken both on her appearance and on her personality. The torture of unrequited love has added a hitherto unsuspected vindictiveness to her character, borne out of Heathcliff ’s alternating cruelty and indifference to her. To the horror of the doctor (Donald Crisp) who has come to tell her of Cathy’s mortal illness, she almost exults in the news, as she feels it might mean Heathcliff has more time for her. But, in fact, when he hears of it, it only triggers a greater aversion for her and a frenzied determination to be at Cathy’s side. For audiences of the time, the deathbed scene must have seemed quite daring, for it has a narrative and psychological morbidity unusual for classic Hollywood cinema. It dares us to endorse a love that transcends conventionality and morality. Heathcliff at this point quite usurps the role of Cathy’s husband, and she dies in his arms looking out onto Penistone Crag, with her husband arriving too late and then being marginalized in the mourning prompted by her death. Even at this point, Heathcliff will continue to defy propriety and

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curse rather than pray for her, in the hope that her unquiet spirit will continue to haunt him beyond death. As the film’s prologue has shown, this is indeed what will happen, and he will die in the storm that opened the film. Because the film essentially covers only the first half of the novel, one might feel that the fates of some of the characters — notably, Edgar, Isabella, and Hindley — are left unresolved. (They all die in the second half of the novel, with a strong hint that Hindley has been murdered by Heathcliff.) However, in the film, they are there essentially to support the main love story, and the writers clearly felt that serving that purpose was sufficient. Some critics, such as Graham Greene, felt the film missed the coarseness and carnality of the novel and diluted its passion and violence. For example, in the film Lockwood simply feels the coldness of Cathy’s dead hand when he hears her voice at the window, whereas in the novel, he is so terrified by her icy grip that he scrapes her arm across broken glass to release himself from it. On the other hand, the film contributes some imaginative and extreme imagery of its own. On the fateful night when Cathy is awaiting the arrival of Edgar to propose marriage, Heathcliff expresses his torment by thrusting his hands through the window pane of the stable. “That’s all I’ve become to you, a pair of dirty hands,” he has said to her earlier, before striking her in an uncontrollable rage that he instantly regrets. Smashing the glass with his bare hands is a gesture that reflects his self-rebuke and self-torture, and anticipates his departure in the storm, whose savagery also seems to echo Cathy’s emotional turmoil when she hears him go, and almost dies in her attempt to follow him. Whether a conventional romantic score is the appropriate accompaniment to such a tale has attracted differing critical views, Alfred Newman’s near-omnipresent music sometimes being attacked for giving the film an over-sentimental coating. Yet, for me, there are numerous felicitous touches in the scoring (for example, the delicate use of the chorus to suggest the other-worldly dimensions of the story) and “Cathy’s theme” is quite simply the loveliest melody he ever wrote. There can be no reservations, however, about Gregg Toland’s outstanding Oscar-winning photography, which provides, to borrow Lin Haire-Sargeant’s eloquent description, “a black-and-white palette of exquisitely shaded tonality ... the luminously glowing whites, the engulfing blacks, and the shimmering grays eloquently express emotional and spiritual nuance” (170). Although the film has all the thematic ingredients of a tragic love story, visually it also catches the demonism of Emily Brontë’s fevered imagination, and has on occasion the brooding atmosphere of a horror film, with its emphasis on darkness and sinister shadow, its use of wind, candles, unsettling portents, mysterious and sharply contrasted houses, and a central relationship hovering between love and hate, life and death, as each seems to feed vampirically off each other’s blood. Speaking to Gene D. Philips about adaptings authors like Brontë and Dreiser to the screen, Wyler said: “I am sure that this is what they would have wanted me to do: to present their material in a new form in the best possible way for a new different medium” (Miller: 72). His fusion of Gothic imagery with the theme of obsessive love is masterly and absolutely true to the spirit of the novel. The film still stands comparison with all subsequent screen adaptations of the work and indeed remains the yardstick by which they have been judged.

The Westerner (1940) “Justin Gray came over and we went to see The Westerner with Gary Cooper. The next day I went back and saw it again by myself. The next day I saw

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Watched by his friend (Gary Cooper, center), Judge Roy Bean at last meets Lillie Langtry: Walter Brennan and Lilian Bond in The Westerner (1940).

it again. My excuse was that I wanted to study a long early scene between Cooper and Walter Brennan, a model of movie acting that naturally required frequent viewing. The real reason was that the alternative was sitting in my office and staring at a blank sheet of paper” — Walter Bernstein, Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist

Being peremptorily tried as a horse-thief in the courtroom-cum-saloon of selfappointed Judge Roy Bean, a cowboy called Cole Hardin (Gary Cooper) is asked where he

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is from. “No place in particular,” he replies. When asked where he is heading, his answer is: “No place special.” This disarming lack of specificity seems somehow appropriate for a film that is exceptionally difficult to pin down in terms of mood, tone, genre, and even reputation. (Like the film also, Hardin’s seeming aimlessness might be deceptive: he is actually heading for California.) Axel Madsen barely gives it a mention in his authorized biography of Wyler; and the director himself rarely made reference to the film in any of his numerous published interviews, no doubt because it hardly ever came up for discussion. Although the title could not be more explicit in signaling generic expectations, The Westerner is full of unusual and even subversive elements that complicate its generic identity and the western genre’s conventionally straightforward morality. In their published history of the genre, Fenin and Everson described the film as “strange,” “moody,” and “austere” (247). Conversely, according to Jan Herman, Wyler described it as “a comedy disguised as a melodrama” (207). Even here, though, the comedy is of an unsettling kind. Early on, a farmer, about to be hanged for shooting a steer, pleads for mercy on the grounds that he was actually aiming at a rancher. “That’s the trouble with you sod-busters,” says Judge Roy Bean, at least acknowledging the farmer’s sense of priorities, “you can’t shoot straight.” Just as we are beginning to chuckle, Bean kicks the horse and we see the farmer’s legs kicking and then dangling helplessly as the noose tightens. The laughter sticks in our throat. This will be an ornery movie, with lashings of gallows humor, and a western that is something of a law unto itself— much like Judge Bean himself, in fact. Having learned his craft through making low-budget westerns during the silent era, Wyler accepted the assignment with enthusiasm, this time having quite a lavish budget of over $1 million and a shooting schedule that allowed extensive location filming in Tucson, Arizona. For Goldwyn, the property proved something of a headache. The film’s release was delayed for several months, partly because of a prolonged dispute between the producer and his distributor, United Artists, and partly because he disliked Dimitri Tiomkin’s score and brought in an overworked Alfred Newman — who had written at least six scores in 1939, four of which were nominated for Academy awards — to rewrite most of the score. (Curiously, Tiomkin’s name remains on the credits as the sole composer and Newman’s uncredited contribution certainly gives the impression of having been composed in something of a rush, being competent but unmemorable.) Goldwyn ensured that one of his new contract players, Dana Andrews, made a brief appearance and had a few lines as a disgruntled farmer, but, against Wyler’s wishes, he also cast another contract player, Doris Davenport, in the film’s leading female role as Jane-Ellen, daughter of the homesteaders’ leader, Caliphet Matthews (Fred Stone). She is actually the only woman in the film who is given anything to say. Wyler thought her unexceptional, but in fairness, she gives an attractive performance in a thinly written role. The problem is not of her own making, but rather with a script that gives her little to do after her first appearance, when she confronts Bean in the saloon. She is continually upstaged by the specter of the actress Lillie Langtry (Lilian Bond) whom Bean worships and who, although unseen until the film’s finale, is the driving force behind the plot. If Wyler did not want Doris Davenport, Gary Cooper did not want to be in the film at all. He quickly recognized that, for all his star billing, he would be in constant danger of being upstaged by his co-star, who had a much stronger role. He was compelled to do the film only because of his contractual obligation to Goldwyn. Despite Wyler’s reassurances and attempts to adjust the script more in Cooper’s favor, his misgivings in this regard proved well founded. His character is given little back story — we seem to know less about him

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than an overtly mysterious western hero like Shane. Raymond Durgnat has made the point that Cooper is often at his best when we glimpse what Durgnat calls his “momentary black rage of fear.” The absence of this, he suggests, is a weakness in The Westerner (Durgnat: 139). It is Walter Brennan’s characterization as Roy Bean that dominates the film, winning him his third supporting Oscar in five years (an achievement still unmatched) and even ousting another outstanding contender that year in a Wyler film, James Stephenson for his performance in The Letter. It is essentially a character-driven more than action-packed western, and its core is the slowly poisoned friendship that develops between the Westerner and the judge. For all his understandable reservations about the role itself, Cooper is very good, unselfishly providing a witty and tender foil to Brennan’s anti-heroic, impish, and devious judge. (André Bazin called Bean “lovable,” but that is surely stretching things a bit far.) Bean’s initial intention of hanging Hardin as a horse thief is temporarily put on hold when Hardin, picking up a comment of Bean’s after Jane-Ellen has stormed out of the saloon (“She’d make a good cattleman. If it wasn’t for Lillie, I’d marry her.”) and noticing the Lillie Langtry regalia around the bar, piques Bean’s curiosity by telling him he has actually met the actress and indeed has a lock of her hair. This is the scene that, in the epigraph to this chapter, Walter Bernstein refers to as “a model of movie acting” (132). Wyler’s camera stays close to the two characters and records every flicker of expression as they become locked in an exchange of mutual suspicion and mutual need. Hardin indirectly pleads for his life while Bean ponders whether he can risk hanging a man who seems to have something he covets. Cooper’s relaxed and even whimsical demeanor here might ostensibly reflect that of a man resigned to his fate, but one can also sense his intuition that, in the game of bluff he is playing, he might have the superior hand. Brennan’s Bean has the intensity of someone so caught up in his romantic obsession that he is prey to any plausible tale that will support it; yet one sees, in the slightest narrowing of the eyes and droop of his facial expression, that this is a man who can change from avuncular to murderous in an instant. “I said, did you get to know her real well?” he asks Hardin as the latter is beginning to slide into one of his casual digressions; the repetition of the question, coupled with Bean’s menacing tone, is a warning to Hardin that he must tread carefully. However, his rejoinder, “I’ll never forget it as long as I live,” with the emphasis on the last phrase, shrewdly sounds a warning to Bean also: if you hang me, it says, I will be taking what I know to the grave. The exchange is punctuated by furtive looks at the so-called jury room in which Hardin’s fate is being decided, and where the suspense comes not from the impending verdict but from whether the deliberations will give Hardin sufficient time to play on Bean’s curiosity. The jury members are actually drinking and playing cards, knowing all too well the adjudication that is required of them. Indeed, the undertaker starts measuring Hardin for his coffin before the verdict is in. A more significant game is being played at the saloon bar, as Hardin plays his final hand and Bean has to decide how to respond to the inevitable verdict. Underneath the cagey exchanges is a suggestion of a growing bond between the two men. Hardin has glimpsed a more vulnerable, human side behind Bean’s autocratic manner. In his reaction to Jane-Ellen’s hostility, Bean has already shown an inclination to respect those who will stand up to him, and Hardin displays nerves of steel. Predictably, Hardin is found guilty but Bean suspends sentence pending further enquiries, which in this case means giving Hardin time to send for his effects from El Paso, which include the lock of Lillie Langtry’s hair. Suddenly the actual thief, King Evans (Tom

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Tyler), who has sold Hardin the horse, enters the saloon. He has just passed the undertaker (Charles Halton) on the way out — a man grumbling about the loss of custom. The undertaker will not have long to wait. Hardin challenges Carson and, in the fight that ensues, Hardin will discover the money he paid for the horse on Carson’s person and Bean will shoot Carson when he pulls out a concealed derringer behind Hardin’s back. Nothing illustrates the film’s mercurial shifts of tone better than what happens in literally the next minute. In a mini-comedy routine, Bean once again shortchanges the undertaker by claiming the dead man’s money as a fine; perversely and brutally insists that Carson be hanged as a horse thief even though he is already dead; and then invites Hardin back into the saloon for a drink with the words, “Come inside, son,” as if a relationship which a few minutes ago had been one of potential hangman/potential victim has metamorphosed into a quasi-paternal bond. The subsequent drama essentially revolves around this central relationship of odd mutual dependency, symbolized by the recurrent gesture of Hardin’s having to straighten out a crick in Bean’s neck (incurred after he has been rescued from a hanging), which corresponds to Bean’s action in saving Hardin’s neck. The two often separate, only for one or the other to be drawn almost magnetically back into the other’s company. After a night of drinking with the judge in the saloon, which has left Bean in a drunken stupor, Hardin has ridden away from town. He is pursued by Bean, who is determined to hold him to his promise of sending for the lock of Lillie’s hair. In one of those offhand details of the film that become more disturbing on reflection, both of them ride through a packed graveyard, which we can infer contains the many victims of Bean’s idea of justice. Indeed, Bean, in his determination to catch up with Hardin, knocks over one of the crosses without giving it a second glance. Although Bean does catch up with him, Hardin rejects his offer that they should team up, and shelters for the night at the house of Jane-Ellen Matthews, who is very surprised to see him, having assumed he must have been hanged by Bean the previous day. “I kept on seeing his face all day,” she has said mournfully to her father — and then is startled as if by a ghost when that very face appears at her window. Yet Hardin will be compelled to return to Vinegarroon when he learns that a group of homesteaders is riding in to kill Bean. He must warn the judge before they arrive, saving Bean’s life as Bean has once saved his. “He’s out — for a while,” he tells the homesteaders when they burst into the saloon, and it is not strictly a lie: he has knocked out the judge and locked his door. However, Bean will regain the upper hand when he surprises the homesteaders by appearing at a different door and forcing them at gunpoint to relinquish their weapons. Nothing is resolved and it is a measure of the film’s disenchantment that Hardin’s attempts to mediate between the two sides fail. The homesteaders do not trust him, and their worst fears are soon to be realized. Bean agrees to Hardin’s proposal to herd the steers out of the valley — and then double-crosses him. “Don’t you trust me, Cole?” Bean asks, as if genuinely offended when Hardin insists on accompanying him during the agreed herding-out of the steers. In reply, Hardin describes a pet rattlesnake he had as a child: he liked it, but would never turn his back on it. Andrew Sarris once described Budd Boetticher’s westerns as “floating poker games where every character took turns at bluffing about his hand until the final showdown” (Sarris, 1968: 124). It is a description that would fit the way this whole relationship is constructed. Hardin has secured Bean’s promise by giving him the lock of Lillie Langtry’s hair, but it is actually a lock of Jane-Ellen’s hair, which he has snipped from her in his pretense at a romantic interest. Bean accepts it and commiserates with Hardin over his loss, but as soon as the cattle are

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cleared out of the valley, he sanctions a raid in which his men set fire to the farmers’ crops and homes and during which Jane-Ellen’s father is killed. When Hardin confronts him, Bean initially denies any foreknowledge of the incident and is prepared to swear his innocence on the Bible, but Hardin knows a foolproof way to get at the truth. He asks Bean to swear his innocence on the lock of Lillie’s hair, and the judge cannot do it. Hardin takes a calculated gamble that Bean will not shoot him in the back when he rides away to secure a warrant for his arrest (Toland’s majestic camerawork is at its finest here, as Wyler holds the shot to convey Bean’s nagging temptation to shoot as Hardin disappears into the distance). A final confrontation is inevitable. It will take place in Fort Davis, where Hardin has become a deputy sheriff. Lillie Langtry is appearing at the opera house and Bean has bought up all 400 tickets so that the show will be for him alone. He arrives and is ushered to his seat by the fussy theater manager but, of course, as he has booked the entire theater to himself, he can choose where he wishes to sit and he moves to the front of the auditorium. As he does so, the camera cranes to show the small figure of Bean isolated in the deserted theater as if to emphasize the absurd grandeur and singularity of his obsession. The members of the orchestra arrive and take their places, the lights dim, the conductor motions to the players, and the overture begins. A close-up on Bean shows his almost painfully eager anticipation as the curtain rises and his romantic dream is about to be realized. Facing him on stage, however, is not Lillie Langtry but Cole Hardin. The shoot-out is a messy affair, unusually realistic in its attention to detail (we see the two men having to reload their weapons) and characteristically off beat in declining to show the shot that fatally wounds Bean. The agreed face-off is thwarted because Bean collapses before either man can draw, though, in a last act of skulduggery, Bean actually has his gun already in his hand when he rises to face Hardin. The denial of generic convention is taken a step further when Hardin assists Bean in his final wish to see Lillie Langtry by carrying him in his arms backstage to her dressing room. In a nice touch, Bean insists that his hat be retrieved so he can wear it as a mark of respect. He also asks that Hardin put him down so that he and Lillie can meet on equal terms. As they meet and she smiles, the image of her blurs and then goes black. It is Wyler’s variation on that moment in Hell’s Heroes where we are given the subjective (and redemptive) point of view of a villain at the moment of his death. When Bean falls and his hand jerks open, we see that he is clutching what he believes is the lock of Lillie’s hair. A brief final scene, which leaps forward in time and shows us Hardin and Jane-Ellen together in their home and the return of the homesteaders, is as perfunctory as the last shot of Wuthering Heights. The real conclusion of the film is the death of Bean and the retrieval by Hardin of Bean’s Civil War sword, with the implicit sense that it will be buried with him. As Hardin leaves, we even see the shadow of the theater curtain being lowered, as if to signify that this is truly the end. Coming only a year after John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), the apotheosis of the classic western at that time, The Westerner must have seemed to Goldwyn a way of cashing in on that film’s success. However, Wyler’s film moves the genre in a different direction and complicates its clear moral outlines. Although Higham and Greenberg claim that “Gary Cooper embodied the forces of good, Walter Brennan as Judge Roy Bean the forces of evil” (130), what is striking about the film is precisely the fact that things are not that simple. Cooper’s hero is basically decent but also devious and a drifter, and Bean, while ruthless and villainous, is also shown to be fearless, capable of affection, and possessing the kind of audacious pioneering spirit that tamed the West. Even beyond the final enmity between them, Cooper’s

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character will help Bean fulfill his deepest wish, which is not what one would expect to happen to a so-called embodiment of evil. It is noticeable, too, that there is no retribution in the film for those of Bean’s men who carried out the raid on the homesteaders’ property, which led to the death of Jane-Ellen’s father. Even stock situations are given an unfamiliar twist. When Hardin is called a sneak and a liar by one of the farmers, Wade Harper (Forrest Tucker), the Westerner recognizes the taunt as an unambiguous invitation for a fight and prepares himself accordingly. We are not yet at the stage of Gregory Peck’s hero in The Big Country who, when similarly challenged, refuses to rise to the bait. Yet the fight itself is a clumsy, even inconclusive affair, with the camera dwelling as much on dust and shadow as on the human conflict, and Wyler cuts mischievously to the next scene before the fight is over, as if eager to avoid the predictable conclusion, and to catch the audience unaware. Something similar happens in the rather anti-climactic final gunfight between Hardin and Bean, which frustrates an audience’s expectation of closure and of the badman being punished. In fact, Bean is given a surprisingly sympathetic send-off considering the number of deaths he has caused. How far the strategy behind this undermining of Western conventions was calculated is hard to say. Wyler always emphasized the film’s comedic tone, which would inevitably tend to deflate the more heroic aspects of the genre. In some ways, the contemporary film it most closely resembles is Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (also 1940), which also takes liberties with genre and unsettlingly mixes comedy and drama in telling its story of a tyrant being finally brought to heel. Also, the tendency of Wyler as a filmmaker would always be to lean more toward realism than myth, and take a less romantic approach to a genre like the western, recognizing that rough justice and necessary violence might have been more true to the reality of the West and its growth than the simple triumph of good over evil. In this, the film is less like Stagecoach than a later Ford western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), with its highly ironic and even bitter reflection on the gap between myth and reality. In fact, the most famous line from that film —“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”— is anticipated in The Westerner in its statement at the outset that “the story is legend based on fact.” The insistent wilderness/garden dichotomy that has prompted so much comment about Valance is foreshadowed quite explicitly in The Westerner, during the homesteaders’ Thanksgiving service, when Matthews offers thanks to God and says that “the land that was desolate has become like a garden.” Like the later Ford, Wyler shows some of the ambiguities behind the legend of America’s pioneering past and the role that violence played in bringing civilization and even legislation to the wilderness. There is a lot of equivocation and ambivalence behind the comedy and the melodrama which, in retrospect, makes The Westerner a disquieting revisionist film somewhat ahead of its time. A brief footnote. In reality, Lillie Langtry never met Judge Bean. She did visit the town of Langtry, Texas, which (as the film shows) was named in her honor by Bean, but he had died a few months before her arrival. In her memoir, The Days I Knew, she mentions that an attempt was made to give her the judge’s pet bear but that the animal escaped and ran away before this gift could be arranged. A bear is given a substantial role in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), a rumbustious and satirical take on the Bean legend by Wyler’s great friend, John Huston.

THREE Three Little Foxes: Davis and Wyler “I might have been Hollywood’s Maria Callas; but Willie Wyler was the male Bette Davis” — Bette Davis, The Lonely Life

“An explosive little broad,” was studio boss Jack Warner’s appraisal of Bette Davis; he was known to blanch visibly when told she wanted to see him. Early on in her film career, Davis had won an Oscar for her role in Dangerous (1935), and although the film is eminently forgettable, the aura of danger clung. Nobody messed with Bette, on screen or off, and hardly anyone could measure up to her exacting standards, artistically or emotionally, whether actors, writers, or directors. The one man who could — and did — was William Wyler. The Davis/Wyler collaboration is one of the great actor/ director partnerships of Hollywood’s Golden Era. For Davis, Wyler was the answer to a prayer. Before their partnership in Jezebel, Davis had fought a running battle with Warner Brothers over the quality of parts she had had to play. She had been put on suspension and lost a much-publicized court case when she attempted to sue the studio over her contract. By the time she came to make the film, she was a veteran of over 30 movies yet still did not know, she said, what it felt like to be working with an outstanding director. By the time the film was finished, she did. It was the first of three films with Wyler, all of them high points of Davis’s career: Jezebel, for which she won an Oscar, and The Letter and The Little Foxes, both of which earned her an Oscar nomination. The pair fought bitterly at times, but through all the battles, neither lost one jot of respect and admiration for the other. There was another factor that gave a particular edge to their collaboration and conflicts. As Bette Davis was later to disclose, Wyler was the love of her life. In the first volume of her autobiography, The Lonely Life, she talks about a man she loved without identifying him, but she describes him in the following way: He was the only man I could respect in every way. However, his strength, his brilliance were such that I felt endangered.... I genuinely fell in love with this titan who shattered every preconceived notion — every single dream. He was capable of taking complete charge and I was petrified.... This was a man who would have run my life from sunrise to sunset. The temptation was enormous.... The man of my life married another [Davis: 182].

Although Wyler was not named explicitly, it would not have been difficult to deduce his identity from the way Davis writes about him elsewhere in the book. It was to be another decade after the publication of The Lonely Life before she let slip that she and Wyler had 67

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After the ball: Fay Bainter (left) and Bette Davis in Jezebel (1938).

been lovers, but after that she was candid about the relationship and what it had meant to her. In a later biography, she was quoted as describing Wyler as “without doubt our greatest American director” and “the love of my life” (Chandler: 120). One suspects that, with Bette Davis, those two things were synonymous.

Jezebel (1938) “Maybe I love her most when she’s mean because that’s when she’s loving most” — Aunt Belle in Jezebel

Adapted for the screen by Clements Ripley, Abel Finkel, and John Huston (his first major screenwriting credit), Owen Davis Sr.’s play, Jezebel, had opened on Broadway in December 1933, with Miriam Hopkins taking on the leading role after Tallulah Bankhead had fallen ill during rehearsals. It ran for only 32 performances, but one person who thought it had distinct filmic possibilities, with potentialities for action, costuming, music, and spectacle — which the screen could exploit better than the theatre — was William Wyler. After seeing the production, he wrote a memo to Carl Laemmle Jr. on December 27, 1933, disagreeing with the adverse review in The Hollywood Reporter and recommending that Universal purchase the rights. “I believe it contains an excellent foundation for a picture,” he wrote, “a very dramatic love story with a background and atmosphere of the South before

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the Civil War.... I recommend it strongly as a vehicle for Margaret Sullavan.” How curious that he should recommend it as a vehicle for an actress whom he had not yet met but who was to become his first wife in a short-lived marriage; and that it should become one of the greatest roles — and a turning point in her career — for an actress, Bette Davis, with whom Wyler was to share a passionate affair. It suggests that the character of Julie Marsden really stirred something in Wyler’s imagination. The role had the same impact on Davis. When Universal passed up the chance to acquire the rights to Jezebel, Warner Brothers shrewdly stepped in. After their arduous court victory against Davis, they were undoubtedly looking for more adventurous roles that would satisfy the rebellious actress and also compensate her for not landing the part of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939). Jezebel seemed to fit the bill on both counts, because not only would this thematically similar film pre-empt the release of David O. Selznick’s blockbuster (which it did), but the role itself seemed to fit the actress like a glove: a fiery female at war with a stuffy patriarchal society. Davis found in Wyler the director she had been looking for — someone quite fearless in telling her when he felt her performance could be improved (“Do you want me to put a chain round your neck?” he would shout at her. “Keep your head still!”) and whose perfectionism matched her own. She also recognized aspects of herself in the character of Julie, a woman in love who is at her meanest when loving the most and who also cannot accept the feminine subservience expected of her in a relationship. Reflecting in The Lonely Life on the failure of her marriages, Davis wrote: “Like Julie in Jezebel, I had to remain in charge. And when the man allowed it, I lost all respect for him” (253). Set in New Orleans in 1852, the film maintains the strong dramatic structure of its source, with the narrative falling naturally into three main stages, each of which climaxes on an impulsive act of the heroine, which is to have a huge impact on her destiny and on those around her. Running concurrently with this astonishing character portrayal — Henri Colpi in 1947 was to describe it as “the most beautiful character study in sound film” (Kern: 173)— is the spread across the territory of yellow fever, which is decimating the population. Like the plague in Death in Venice, the deadly contagion acts as a metaphor both for the self-destructive romantic fever of the main character and the deep-rooted sickness at the heart of the society in which she moves and which, unknown to itself, is in its death throes. Julie Marsden seems almost like a Hedda Gabler of the American South, a headstrong heroine who finds little outlet for her intelligence and vitality in a man’s world and whose energies are thus channeled into perversities of love that signal a vibrant personality frustrated by an oppressive and patronizing social order. In a tour-de-force of characterization, Bette Davis imperiously scales each extremity of this extraordinary creation, at one moment flaming defiance in a red dress, at another acting contrite in a white one, and finally going almost literally through hellfire for the man she loves in a deed of noble self-sacrifice that is also, to borrow Eric Rhode’s resonant phrase, an act of “voluptuous suicide” (Rhode: 357). The first part of the film is an extended demonstration of the heroine’s daring yet potentially self-destructive defiance of convention. Before her actual appearance, we learn that she is engaged to be married to a liberal and innovative banker, Pres Dillard (Henry Fonda, exuding unflinching integrity), an engagement previously postponed because she had broken her collarbone while attempting to master a wild horse. Already, then, she has exhibited a desire to dominate that has left her injured but unbowed. A disappointed suitor, Buck Cantrell (George Brent), has felt compelled to challenge a man to a duel when the latter alludes to Buck’s romantic disappointment and mentions Julie’s name in a barroom.

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A man of old-fashioned codes, Buck cannot allow such an indiscretion to go unchecked. He plays by his society’s rules, not recognizing that both the rules and the society are now anachronisms that will prove his undoing. Accompanied by Pres’s brother, Ted (Richard Cromwell), Buck is attending an engagement party for Julie arranged by her Aunt Belle (Fay Bainter), who has raised her from a child. There is so far only one hitch to the polite proceedings: the person in whose honor the party is being held has not yet showed up. Cue the arrival of Julie on horseback, leaping off a temperamental thoroughbred prior to her entrance at the party. Davis often recounted how Wyler took enormous trouble over that entrance before he was satisfied (she recalled 45 takes) because he wanted to establish the character indelibly in a single gesture: the way she lifts the back of her skirt with her riding crop before striding into the house — a gesture at once flamboyant, brash, self-confident, and touched with irresistible panache. Not content with bemusing and alarming her guests by entering the elegant party in her riding clothes (a precursor of the more serious impact she will have when arriving improperly dressed at the Olympus Ball), she will also flout convention by taking a drink of alcohol. A brief, slightly flirtatious conversation with Buck reveals that she and Pres are planning to move north to New York after their marriage, a move that Buck sees as a betrayal of Julie’s roots and an act of treachery on the part of Pres. When she tells Buck that Pres is a banker not a traitor, he replies, ironically, “I’ll remember there’s a difference.” The conversation about betrayal seems, almost imperceptibly, to discomfort Julie, for why is Pres not at her party? Is the bank more important to him than his fiancée? Has she been betrayed? When she proposes a toast to “Dillard and Sons,” Wyler offers a close-up of Julie; and one will note that, in the film, he will tend to move into a close-up of Julie only at moments of doubt or when her expression seems to contradict her words. There will be another example of that when she again flouts the rules by entering the male preserve of the bank and insists on seeing Pres to find out why he has not attended the party, and is now pulling out of his earlier promise to accompany her to help select her dress for tomorrow’s ball. “Good day, Mr. Dillard,” she says, when he insists that the importance of the bankers’ meeting must take priority. “I’m so sorry to have troubled you.” The politeness of her response belies the resentment she feels, and which will boil over, in a spectacular form of displacement, in her next big scene. At the dressmaker’s, surely still seething over Pres’s behavior, which has relegated her as second in importance to his work, Julie sees a red dress that has been made for “that infamous Vickers woman” (we need little indication of Miss Vickers’s profession) and is in strident contrast to the white dress Julie has been trying on (white is code for unmarried women attending the ball). “Saucy, isn’t it?” she says of the dress. “And vulgar,” says Aunt Belle in disgust, to which Julie replies, gleefully, “Yes, it is.” It is rather a risqué scene for its time, particularly when Julie insists on taking off her white dress to try on the scarlet one, and Wyler reveals her underwear in a mirror shot that allows us to see both front and back. However, the shot also allows us to see the cage around her waist over which the white dress has been draped. It is a startling image of femininity constrained by Southern notions of propriety and respectability. It is no surprise that a tigress such as Julie would wish to break free from such confines and express her femininity in a much more liberated way. It is equally clear, however, that doing so will risk social opprobrium and ostracism. When Pres visits her at her home after their unsatisfactory encounter at the bank and hears that Julie refuses to see him, he rushes upstairs to confront her, picking up a cane as a weapon to whip her into obedience, as recommended earlier to him by his friend, Dr. Livingston [Donald Crisp]. However, he is completely outmaneuvered. As he knocks on

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her bedroom door, she hums “Beautiful Dreamer” to herself and then walks calmly to the door and locks it, before tending to her makeup in front of three mirrors, an image that seems to maximize her brazenness and Pres’s humiliation. As he hammers ever more loudly, she calls out in mock innocence, “Who is it?” No one has ever surpassed Davis for screen sarcasm and she is supreme here, using all the wiles at her command to undermine and exhaust masculine assumptions of supremacy. When she finally opens the door and notices Pres’s cane, there is a low angle shot from behind the cane which seems to direct our gaze in a straight line toward Julie’s eyes, and which André Bazin cited as an example of Wyler’s visual sensitivity. Acknowledging Jean Mitry’s similar observation over this shot, he noted that “we thus follow the dramatic line between the character and the object much better than we would have if, by the rules of conventional cutting, the camera had shown us the cane from the point of view of Bette Davis herself ” (Bazin, “William Wyler, or the Jansenist of Directing,” 1948; cited in Cardullo: 22). I have already identified another such moment in The Shakedown, and the same visual characteristic will recur in The Collector in a similar dramatic context to signal one character’s awareness that the other is intending physical harm. It is a reminder of the unobtrusiveness yet exactitude of Wyler’s visual organization of dramatic space in his films. In fact, Julie will soon have Pres in her clutches, and the moment when he puts his cane down in order to embrace her is the moment when she knows she has won. Looking at the cane languishing harmlessly and lopsidedly against the wall in the corner of her bedroom (the sexual connotations need no elaboration, not least because this is a shot from Julie’s point of view, as if to confirm her victory), she can now ask from her position of advantage, “Would you like to see my new dress?” Pres is predictably horrified, and adamant that when he picks her up for the ball tomorrow night, she will be wearing white. As he leaves, though, she remarks: “You forgot your stick.” “I forgot to use it too,” he says, ruefully, to which she replies, almost wistfully, “So you did.” The victory is hers, but at what cost? Once again Wyler moves in for a close-up of Julie that suggests some doubt in her mind about what she has achieved. Has she gone too far? Even Buck, for all his admiration of her, will refuse to be her escort when she is bedecked in that apparel. It would be an affront to propriety and to the customs of the society he holds dear. Having hidden herself from view until the last possible moment, Julie appears before Pres in readiness for the ball and dressed in a manner that is the equivalent of a gauntlet tossed at his feet. Which one of them will back down? He has said earlier that if she persisted in her foolish scheme, they would have to stay at home doing embroidery. Julie has pointedly put aside her embroidery to engage in this ultimate battle of wills. Her final test of Pres is essentially a taunt directed at his manhood. “You’re sure it’s the red dress?” she says, when he again expresses his horror at what she is wearing. “It couldn’t be you’re afraid ... afraid somebody will insult me, and you’ll find it necessary to defend me?” A defiance of custom has now modulated into an insinuation of cowardice. As a man of honor, Pres is left with no alternative. Everything thus far has been building toward the Olympus Ball, where Wyler delivers one of his greatest set-pieces. The scene is launched with a spectacular crane shot that pulls back over the orchestra to the dance floor filled with waltzing couples, before it ascends again to a viewpoint behind a chandelier, to view the entire spectacle. The camera then pans gracefully across a room full of people representing the epitome of Southern gentility and high society and moves to floor level to catch the flow of movement from the dancing and, in particular, the swirl of white dresses. The entrance of Julie, escorted by Pres, is first shown in medium shot, but the camera moves closer when she removes her cloak to reveal

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her dress. Red has never flamed so brightly in a black-and-white movie. There is an audible gasp from those around her, even including the maidservants. One by one, immediate acquaintances find an excuse to depart from their company, fearing taint by association. As the camera tracks forward with Julie and Pres, the guests in their path rapidly retreat, as if from someone with the plague (an early visual connection between the romantic main plot and the secondary social theme of the film). A close-up of Henry Fonda’s Pres reveals a character rigid-jawed with determination to see this through and staring directly at the other guests as if daring one of them to make an uncomplimentary remark. Even Buck, who usually relishes a duel situation, is intimidated when Pres provocatively contests his remark about the “coolness” in the room. “I don’t find it particularly cool,” he says testily, as if inviting an argument, to which Buck replies, “Why, no....” wisely deciding to shift his ground. Things are indeed heating up, for at this point, Max Steiner’s waltz theme — one of his loveliest and one of which his godfather, Richard Strauss, would have been proud — begins, and Pres leads a now-reluctant Julie to the dance floor, to the consternation of the other dancers. In The Lonely Life, Davis describes the scene as “movie making on the highest plane” and her subsequent description is worth quoting at length as an eloquent insight into her perception of what is going on in the minds of the characters at this point: Insisting that my correct escort dance with me — knowing that I am making him an accomplice in this gaucherie — and his refusal to stop, once the floor is cleared by the revolted dancers who consider us pariahs, is so mortifying that Julie wants to die. But now Pres is relentless in his punishment. His own embarrassment is nothing to the shame he must inflict on her. Julie implores him to take her home. His grip on her waist becomes tighter, his step more deliberate, his eyes never meet hers. And always the lilting music, the swirling bodies and the peripheral reaction shots of the stunned pillars of society, and Aunt Belle, who suffers with Julie [Davis: 177].

When the conductor is discreetly asked to stop the performance as all the dancers save Pres and Julie have vacated the floor, Pres turns and, still holding Julie tightly as she tries to break free, instructs him to continue. “Go on and play,” he says, repeating the injunction when the conductor hesitates. The music resumes, the couple continue dancing, and the last shot is a melancholic, curtailed reversal of the way the scene opened, the camera this time pulling away briefly and showing not a crowded dance floor but an isolated couple waltzing, while the other guests form a white semi-circle of disapproval around the edges of the film frame. Later, returning them to their home, Pres will bid Aunt Belle goodnight but Julie goodbye. Taking in the distinction, Julie moves to shake his hand but then slaps him across the face, partly as rebuke but also perhaps to provoke a different response. He simply says, “Goodbye, Julie,” walks to his carriage, and leaves, his departure suggested through a closeup on the emotionally conflicted Julie as she follows with her face and eyes the movement of the carriage. Aunt Belle, who often performs the function of Julie’s conscience, calls her a fool and recognizes that a line has been crossed. In the final shot of the scene, Julie ascends the staircase to her room while Aunt Belle watches her from below. It is the kind of composition we will come to recognize as trademark Wyler, for there will be a strikingly similar visual arrangement involving Regina (Bette Davis) and her daughter (Teresa Wright) in the finale of The Little Foxes, for example, and McKay (Gregory Peck) and his fiancée, Pat (Carroll Baker), in a crucial argument in The Big Country. In each case, the character ascending the stairs is in a state of high agitation and wounded pride, while the one below seems, in a compositional irony, to have assumed the moral high ground. Another Julie ( Jean Sim-

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mons), in The Big Country, will pose a question to her friend Pat that is very relevant to Julie Marsden at this point in Jezebel: “How many times does a man have to win you?” The Olympus Ball has proved one test too many for the man Julie loves. A year will pass before Julie and Pres meet again, during which time the yellow fever outbreak has spread ever nearer to the city. Julie has taken refuge in reclusive self-recrimination, seeing few visitors and rarely going out. The last time she went to the theater, we learn, was to see Camille— no doubt to empathize with the stricken heroine. When Dr. Livingston pays a visit to Julie and Aunt Belle, his involuntary reference to the Olympus Ball is enough to generate an awkwardness so marked that the ensuing silence seems to throb like an open wound. In fact, the doctor, as well as advising them to leave the city because of the imminent plague, has some news to impart that Aunt Belle will relay to Julie: namely, that Pres is returning to take charge of the bank. At this, there is a close-up of Davis, who looks radiant. (In her autobiography, Davis mentioned that the cameramen and the stills photographer were telling her that she had never looked more beautiful on film, and she attributed this to her love for Wyler.) She immediately sets plans in motion to remove herself to the family plantation at Halcyon, with Julie insisting that her friends (whom she has until then been studiously avoiding) join her in welcoming Pres home. What she does not know is that, while in New York, Pres has married someone else. Prior to this revelation, Julie has been busying herself around the house in preparation for Pres’s return. Her nervous excitement is conveyed through a host of dramatic details, such as her obsessive moving of a vase of flowers into different places in the room in an endeavor to find the ideal spot, and a rather remarkable moment when she kisses Aunt Belle on the lips to suggest her overflow of joy (the action looks spontaneous and seems to take both actresses by delighted surprise). The mood is ingeniously picked up in the score by Max Steiner, who was sometimes too prolific for his own good, perhaps, but is at his most musically inventive here, as a black servants’ song heard coming from outside begins to quicken in tempo, as if catching the spirit in the air as all await the arrival of Pres’s carriage. Upstairs, Julie is readying herself for his return by preparing to wear the white dress she had rejected for the ball, so that she can now project the image of passive white femininity expected of her. We learn that she has given her red dress to her maid, Zette (Theresa Harris), whose fluttering around Julie is a reflection of the inner agitation that Julie is feeling but must now suppress. Although Wyler could not escape from the stereotyping of the black characters common in Hollywood movies at the time, and which now dates the film, there is also no doubt that these characters are seen sympathetically and are important both to the film’s social and political observations, and also to an extension of emotional range in the film that the white characters either do not have or are expected to restrain. (There is a particularly fine discussion of this aspect of Jezebel in Dyer: 136–41: see bibliography.) Zette’s physical activity, as she races along the huge hallway and down the stairs to call to the boys outside to check on the approach of a carriage, is an external correlative to Julie’s inner state of mind, as, alone in her room, her turmoil of emotions must swirl behind a façade of immaculate composure. The first carriage to arrive is actually that of Buck Cantrell and his entourage. The next carriage contains Pres, who is greeted lovingly by Aunt Belle. It is a moment before she notices another figure stepping out of his carriage, his wife, Amy (Margaret Lindsay). What follows is one of those sequences in Wyler where you find yourself taking deep breaths at the psychological suspense and the anticipation of painful revelation. (Pauline Kael felt the same about moments in The Heiress.) Every movement in the house at this

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stage is choreographed very naturally, but is also charged with tension, as Aunt Belle, while attempting to service the needs of her guests and particularly those of the new arrival, anxiously and furtively looks around for Julie, to forewarn her of this potentially devastating news. Meanwhile, the unsuspecting Julie (in a manner reminiscent of her behavior in the red dress before her departure for the ball) is concealing herself at different parts of the house so as to maximize the impact of her ultimate appearance. The reunion, when it comes, catches us slightly off-guard, because Wyler has cleverly inserted a brief moment before it which is both moving in itself but has wider implications for the drama as a whole. When Pres is offered a drink by the chief servant, Uncle Cato (Lew Paton), he invites Cato to join him, a gesture that is, in its way, as daring a challenge to Southern social protocol as Julie’s red dress. (It anticipates the political argument over Northern and Southern values that will take place in the later dinner scene, where, as Cato dutifully pours the drinks for the guests, Pres will insist that, in any future conflict between North and South, Northern machinery will win over unskilled slave labor.) Cato himself is a little taken aback by Pres’s gesture, but graciously suggests that he will drink it in the pantry, his dignified withdrawal at first seeming to be prompted by a simple resumption of his duties but which is also motivated by his realization that someone else is in the room. Julie is standing at the entrance in her white dress. She has come not simply to greet Pres but to ask his forgiveness. “I dreamed about it so long,” she says of his return, “a lifetime...,” and then, looking down (it is perhaps the most poignant single moment in Davis’s whole performance), she adds, “No ... Longer than that....” To Pres’s embarrassment, she kneels before him, her white dress fanning out beneath her to form a halo of humility. Steiner’s music has accompanied the reunion with the waltz melody from the ball now quietly hummed over the soundtrack by a chorus in a way that conjures up an almost religious aura for Julie’s gesture of contrition, but it then — and noticeably — stops. Amy has appeared, and Pres introduces his wife. Julie cannot at first take it in, looking from one to the other in baffled incredulity. “Your wife? Pres’s wife? You’re funnin’!” she says, to which Pres responds, “Hardly.” Aunt Belle now belatedly arrives, usefully on hand to ensure that Julie observes the appropriate proprieties toward her guests but too late to ameliorate the sickening sense of shock. When the two leave the room and Aunt Belle moves to comfort Julie, the heroine snaps, “For heaven’s sake, don’t be gentle with me! Do you think I want to be wept over?” She is not soliciting pity; she is seeking revenge. And, as if in answer to her desires, Buck Cantrell appears at the doorway, on cue, albeit unwittingly, to do her dubious bidding. In fact, Julie’s plan will go disastrously awry. Over dinner, when she ostentatiously sides with Buck’s traditional Southern values, she openly tries to provoke a quarrel between Pres and Buck that will lead to confrontation. Unfortunately for her, she is thwarted by the fact that Pres is paying little attention, and anyway, is in an accommodating mood. He might disagree with everything Buck says, but, quoting Voltaire, Pres says he will defend to the death Buck’s right to say it. Such sophistry is completely lost on Buck (“That don’t make sense!” he protests); his limited intellect is the other obstacle in the way of Julie’s plans. He will quite fail to see the strategy behind her flattery until too late, by which time he finds himself committed to a duel with the wrong opponent. When Julie tries to talk him out of it, he pretends not to understand what she means, before looking pointedly at her and saying, “I guess there’s a lot I don’t understand.” These are the last words he will say to her. George Brent was never the liveliest of screen actors — David Shipman described his performance as Buck Cantrell as “having all the animation of a penguin” (Volume 1:

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447)— but Wyler uses Brent’s customary stolidness cleverly here to convey the character’s fatally belated recognition of Julie’s manipulation of him, and also to suggest, at the end, a certain dignity behind the mental sluggishness. What has happened is that, after the dinner and during a piano recital by Aunt Belle, Julie has followed Pres outside the house. There is a moment before her appearance when he almost absentmindedly squashes an insect on the back of his hand. Is this the instant when he catches yellow fever? (The detail is marked by an abrupt but ominous burst of music that draws attention to the significance of the moment.) Almost simultaneously, Julie appears on the porch and moves toward him, the emotional fever rising alongside the physical. When she kisses him and is rebuffed, she says “You’re afraid,” similar to the charge she had made about his reluctance to take her to the ball. The challenge here will have the same effect of driving him away. She will imply to Buck that Pres has made a drunken pass at her, but before that can be developed into a quarrel, Pres is called back to the bank and has to leave in haste. When Buck’s insulting insinuations, under Julie’s sly encouragement, begin to involve Amy, Ted will take up the cudgels on behalf of his brother and his new sister-in-law. Buck will find himself trapped in a confrontation with a young man whom he likes and with whom he has no real quarrel. He cannot back down, but will take the gentleman’s way out (as he sees it) and allow himself to be killed. There is an extraordinary scene when Julie realizes that Buck is not to be dissuaded from his action. It coincides with her invitation to the black workers and children to sing for her guests. She cuts short their song about marriage, and leads them into singing “Gonna Raise a Ruckus Tonight.” To Aunt Belle’s dismay, she says, spitefully, “Have the little Yankee join in,” her hostility to Amy now, and inexcusably, out in the open. “We have such charming customs down here,” she says to Amy sarcastically, whose horror at Ted’s involvement in a duel on her behalf is only accentuated by the enforced jollity before her. The whole display will become a profound demonstration of the depths of Julie’s simultaneous fury and frustration, hysteria masquerading as high spirits, defiance again combined with desperation. The exuberance of the song is in complete contrast to the anguish she feels (and also contrasts with Aunt Belle’s decorous piano recital earlier, which is more the kind of thing expected of women of Julie’s background and breeding). Yet it has a thematic appropriateness — Julie seems always to be raising a ruckus in contrast to the polite passivity demanded of her. Indeed, the song, which she initiates and then almost conducts, seems in its very incongruity to be the only outlet for her feelings of distress, disappointment, and anger. The white community of which she is a part allows her no room to unleash the force of her emotions. The final shot of the sequence isolates her in darkness and in close-up — and in tears. As with the incident with the red dress, Julie’s behavior has alienated those around her, though the desire of the guests to leave has been thwarted because the fever line has reached the plantation and a quarantine has been imposed. Once again, Aunt Belle is a soundingboard for the values of the community which Julie has violated, for when Julie, after hearing of Buck’s death, is aware of her Aunt’s eyes upon her and asks her what she is thinking, she is told: “I’m thinking of a woman called Jezebel who did evil in the sight of God.” The uneasy atmosphere in the household is reflected in a dinner scene marked by awkward silences and faltering conversation, in contrast to the lively chatter of the previous dinner we have witnessed. The tone changes when Cato brings news that Pres has caught the fever. He is being looked after in Julie’s house by Dr. Livingston, but is in danger of being shipped out to the leper colony of Lazarette Island, where fever victims are taken with little hope of recovery. General Bogardus immediately sets off to see the governor to obtain a pass that

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will enable them to cross the fever line to see Pres. Unknown to them, Julie will not wait that long and, with the aid of a black servant, procures a canoe to take her across the swamps so that she may reach Pres sooner. When the General, Aunt Belle, Ted, and Amy arrive at the room where Pres is being attended to, they are amazed to find that Julie is there before them, tending Pres with loving care. For once, potential feelings of embarrassment and possible accusations of impropriety are of secondary consideration given the urgency of the situation. This in turn anticipates the culminating scene between Julie and Amy, which will provide the crux of the drama. When Dr. Livingston leaves Pres’s room and sees Julie stretched out on the couch downstairs, he comments that she should get some rest, “otherwise we’ll be sending you off to the island, too.” On hearing that last word, an exhausted Julie suddenly jolts into a state of alert. Her fears about Pres are confirmed when she overhears Amy insisting to Dr. Livingston, against his strenuous objections, that she be allowed to accompany her husband to the island. The irony is that it might be Amy who gives Julie the idea of taking her place. The scene between them that follows is complex, the challenge being to catch the emotional nuances that lay beneath the surface of the dialogue. Ostensibly, Julie’s argument for going is that she has a toughness and a local knowledge of the language and customs that Amy does not have (it gives a retrospective frisson to her earlier line to Amy, “We have such charming customs here”) and might therefore have a better chance of saving Pres’s life. The subtext is that both women love Pres, and that this might be Julie’s strategy to take Pres away from his wife. When Amy asks if Pres is still in love with her, Julie denies it, essentially asking for the chance to redeem herself for the wrongs she has done. Davis’s performance here is superb, the voice tight and controlled, as near to a monotone as she can make it, as if desiring to persuade Amy of the logic of what she is saying rather than be swayed by the emotion behind it. She also is careful to compliment Amy on her courage and bravery if she allows Julie this opportunity. Margaret Lindsay is fine here, too, conveying a gentle and principled character grappling with a dilemma quite outside her usual experience, all the while standing awkwardly a little way up the stairs, as if uncertain whether to go up or down. As the sick body of Pres is carried past them, to be loaded onto the cart that will carry him to the island, Amy says, “God bless you both,” and in that way gives her consent. As Julie rushes through the open door (in her devotion to the task in hand, she has no time to say goodbye), there is a wonderful shot of three figures on the balcony in the background watching her departure — and having at that time no knowledge of the drama enacted between Julie and Amy: the General, Ted, and Aunt Belle. What makes the shot especially moving is that we see Aunt Belle in the background, beautifully played by Fay Bainter, and the character whose love for Julie has never wavered and who has understood her better than anyone. Aunt Belle turns away from the other two, as if she senses what has happened and can bear to look no longer. Although the ending is unusually open for a film of that era, the feeling is that Julie, along with Pres, is doomed, but has at last found some inner peace or vindication. She is a character who, as much as anyone else in Wyler’s work, exemplifies the duality of human nature and who can be cruel and hateful, but also admirable and heroic. The cannons boom, the street fires flare up and the close-ups of Davis suggest a noble and stoic acceptance of where the fates are taking her. One is reminded of the great ending of A Tale of Two Cities, where a character’s struggle for a sense of self-worth finds its resolution in self-sacrifice: “It is a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to....” And to cap off the superb final shots of Davis with her

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loved one, Max Steiner’s music, as it has throughout, rises to the occasion, the main theme at first taking the form of a funeral dirge, then transforming into a chorus that adds a note of nobility, before a return of the waltz theme that is so evocative of the emotional conflicts that have driven the film, and whose slightly manic tempo now gives it the air of a macabre dance of death.

The Letter (1940) “With all my heart I still love the man I killed” — The last line of The Letter

The opening shot of The Letter is one of the most elaborate of Wyler’s entire career. As the moon passes across a cloud, its light illuminates a sign that reads “Rubber Co. Singapore Plantation No.1.” Rubber drips from a tree into a container and, as the coolies relax or doze, the camera pans slowly across the camp at night before drawing parallel to the main plantation house in the distance. Suddenly a shot rings out. A cockatoo flies as if in shock from its perch, and in long shot we see a man stagger onto the veranda, clutching at the banister before falling to the ground. He is followed by a woman, Leslie Crosbie (Bette Davis), with a gun in her hand. As the camera moves in — for the kill, as it were — she continues to fire at the now lifeless body until the click of the hammer indicates that the revolver

The confession: Herbert Marshall and Bette Davis in The Letter (1940).

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is empty. The faces of the shocked plantation workers are seen in shadow as the moon goes behind a cloud, but when it reappears, it startlingly illuminates the heroine’s face as she turns to look in its direction. It is a riveting introduction. To extract the full impact of the killing, Wyler felt he needed a quiet and elaborate buildup that could establish place and mood, and a sense of dramatic expectancy. (David Lean was to learn from Wyler’s example, he said, when filming Omar Sharif ’s famous first appearance in Lawrence of Arabia.) The use of the moon for dramatic effect will occur several times during the film, too much, so Wyler came to think, though the idea was a sound one. He had told the film’s excellent screenwriter Howard Koch that he felt the film needed some image or thing that would be a regular reminder to the heroine of what she had done, and keep her guilt at the forefront of her and the audience’s consciousness. Koch came up with the notion of the shooting happening in moonlight and was delighted with Wyler’s visual elaboration of the idea, particularly when the light seems to flood accusingly through the blinds of Leslie’s window, throwing bar-like stripes of shadow across her white blouse to suggest both the prison where she ought to be and the emotional prison she feels she is in. In an ingenious insight, Jan Herman likened the motif as a recurrent visual symbol of sin to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s use of the letter “A” as a constant reminder of the heroine’s adultery in The Scarlet Letter (Herman: 212). In the final scene, which is in many ways a replay in reverse of the opening, the moonlight will seem to guide the heroine hypnotically to her death. The other symbol that is allowed to carry some weight is the lace which the Head Boy (Tatsu Komai) picks up from the floor when Mrs. Crosbie, after the shooting, has retreated to her room in distress. We learn later that she has been working on the lace before the arrival of the victim, Hammond. Higham and Greenberg nicely described its symbolic import, referring to “her lace, stitched oval by tiny oval through trial and subsequent confession, at once a symbol of her amazing will power — her ability to build piece by piece a complex pattern of deceit — and a method by which she steadies her nerves to face the ordeal” (142). It could be taken even further as a symbol of the emptiness of her days which she has to fill with her needlework. In some ways, she anticipates Catherine with her embroidery in The Heiress, but also the deceptive façade of gentility and respectability she presents to the community, a façade only confirmed by the glasses she needs to wear for her work and which hide her most expressive feature, her eyes. Her friends think the lace’s delicate finery is an expression of herself; it is more like a concealment of self. One of the most charged moments in the film occurs in a scene on the evening before her trial. As she works on her lace a friend asks what it is for. “It’s a coverlet for our bed,” Leslie replies. Then she catches the eye of her lawyer, Howard Joyce ( James Stephenson), who knows the truth behind the shooting and Leslie’s violation of the marital bed through her affair with the dead man. In the lawyer’s expression, one can almost feel the disgust — and fascination — that quivers beneath that stiff upper-lip. Somerset Maugham had adapted The Letter for the stage from a short story he had written in 1924, which in turn had been inspired by an actual event that had scandalized Malaya in 1911, when the English wife of a headmaster shot her lover. Apart from the interpolation of one or two scenes, some discreet opening-out of the setting, minor modifications and redistribution of lines, and a changing of the ending necessitated by the Production Code, the film adheres to Maugham’s text fairly closely. On loan for the second time to Warners, Wyler did not endear himself to studio head Jack Warner with his painstaking methods any more than he had with Jezebel. A particularly irate memo from Warner ( June

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27, 1940) complained of Wyler’s filming the same scene 14 times, reminded him that there was a war on, and accused him of threatening to put Warners out of business, before concluding, rather sheepishly, that he nevertheless noted that Wyler was two days ahead of schedule. In fact, until the final scene, filming went quite smoothly. Bette Davis was ecstatic at the prospect of being directed by Wyler again and rose to the challenge of a role that Gladys Cooper and Katherine Cornell had triumphed with on stage in London and on Broadway, respectively, and which had provided a sensational screen debut for Jeanne Eagels when she had appeared in the 1929 film. Many critics — Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, Alexander Walker, and Charles Higham among them — are on record as declaring it either their favorite Davis performance or her finest. Walker described it as “arguably her best study in neurotic compulsion. Deceit becomes her. It sharpens her femininity” (Walker: 264). “Very likely the best study of female sexual hypocrisy in film history,” was Kael’s opinion. “Cold and proper, she yet manages to suggest the fury and frustration of a murderess” (Kael, 1966: 369). Davis is matched by an equally fine performance from James Stephenson as her lawyer. Wyler had been persuaded to audition Stephenson at the request of Jack Warner, who thus far had been unable to find any part worthy of Stephenson’s ability. Wyler tested him and thought Stephenson ideal, at which point Warner contacted Wyler again and said that, if the part were that important, it should probably be given to a bigger name. However, Wyler stuck to his guns and his faith in the actor was amply rewarded. Stephenson gave a quietly agonized performance of a principled man who is compelled to sacrifice his personal integrity in order to save the heroine’s skin. Stephenson’s untimely death within a year of the film’s release robbed the screen of an exceptionally skilled actor. “Remember ... we’re all friends here,” says Police Commissioner Withers (Bruce Lester) as he invites Leslie to give her account of what happened that evening. With her are her husband and her lawyer. After the shooting, Leslie locked herself in her bedroom and refused to be seen until her husband returned home. When she emerged, the most immediately striking thing (unnoticed by the men, of course, who were not present at the incident) is that she has changed her clothing. She is now dressed demurely in a white blouse and skirt, the blouse in particular projecting an air of purity and innocence, its very conspicuous whiteness subliminally signaling how the white community sticks together in a situation of this kind. The commissioner’s comment, then, hardly suggests judicial impartiality, and serves as a sympathetic foundation from which Leslie can spin her tale, which she does with admirable control, only occasionally threatening to break down under the pressure of recollection. Withers is later to say he has never heard anything so impressive as her dignified description of her ordeal. Joyce will also be struck by how remarkable it is that Leslie has never subsequently deviated in any detail from her account of what happened, though, in his case, one suspects that this increases not his admiration but his suspicion. Davis’s delivery of the speech is a model of dramatic control, dignified and even slightly prim as she recounts the compliments preceding the actual assault. When she begins to describe the attempted seduction and repeats Hammond’s words, “Don’t you know I’m awfully in love with you?,” Wyler cuts to a close-up and a slight shift in Davis’s expression and delivery, the line being said in a tight-lipped tone that seems directed more to herself than to anyone else there. At this point, she stands and starts moving around the room, with Wyler’s subjective camerawork at one stage mirroring Leslie’s reenactment of the incident as she recalls being carried over the step, then grasping the gun from the drawer and

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following Hammond as he stumbled out of the house before falling. The most striking feature of Wyler’s staging, however, is that much of Leslie’s disclosure is made either with her back to the other people in the room or with her back to the camera. This might reflect her feelings of awkwardness, embarrassment, and shame but it also prevents the other characters from reading her facial expression at key moments, which might also be part of her intention. This visual strategy not only adds a layer of ambiguity to her monologue, but also suggests that, even at this stage, Wyler had the ending in mind, that full-face confession to her husband over which he and Davis fought so bitterly, but a battle which Wyler had to win. If Davis had had her way, it would have negated his careful preparation of the finale, which is apparent right from the beginning of the film. Although Leslie is charged with murder and imprisoned, her account of what happened is universally accepted as the truth. Acquittal at the trial looks assured. This seems doubly certain after the discovery of Hammond’s so-called “secret life” that has discredited him in the eyes of the European community: namely, that he was married to a Eurasian woman (Gale Sondergaard), whom we have seen in the shadows of the plantation on the fateful night and who, after everyone had left, grieved over her husband’s dead body. There is just one detail that has given Joyce pause. Once Leslie had shot Hammond and he no longer posed any threat, why did she keep firing at the body until the revolver was empty? The action seems out of proportion if the motive for killing is one of self-defense. This slight seed of doubt grows when Joyce is informed of the existence of a letter to Hammond from Leslie inviting him to the house (she has always maintained he called unannounced) on the day of the killing. It will lead to a life-and-death confrontation between Leslie and Joyce at the prison. Andrew Sarris wrote admiringly of what he called Davis’s “amazingly quiet, tense, sensitive scenes with James Stephenson’s gently probing defense counsel, the scenes in which talk dribbles on and on until it is transmuted into the most ringing truth” (Sarris, 1998: 407). Having first claimed the letter is a forgery and then saying she invited Hammond to the house only to discuss a birthday present for her husband, she panics when Joyce reminds her of the letter’s incriminating contents: it is clearly the message of an emotionally distraught woman demanding to see someone with whom she is, or has been, on intimate terms. Davis’s eyes widen in horror and she sits back on her bed as if cornered by a dangerous animal as her lawyer spells out the implications of this new evidence. When he sternly suggests she tell him just enough of the truth to save her neck, the crushing weight of her dilemma hits her and she falls into a faint. When she regains consciousness, she is lying on the bed of the jail’s infirmary, with Joyce standing uneasily at the back of the room. Once again Wyler films her with her back to the camera, a ploy which has now become a signal of the heroine’s deceit. As she stretches her arm to the edge of the frame, her voice takes on a tone of almost purring seduction, for not only is she in a desperate situation but so is her lawyer. Is he really going to let them hang her? A carefully choreographed scene follows, in which movement, framing, and lighting subtly change according to who seems to hold the balance of power, or which one is more at the mercy of the other. It will build to one of the most intense moments of the film, when Leslie tries to persuade Joyce, against all the ethics of his profession and his own personal integrity, to obtain the letter — at least, she says, so as to spare the feelings of her unsuspecting husband (Herbert Marshall) and irrespective of what he thinks of her. “It isn’t important what I feel about you, do you understand?” he snaps back, and for a moment there is a pregnant pause and an exchange of close-ups between them that is heavy with unexpected erotic tension, as if both have picked up on Joyce’s almost Freudian slip from

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what he might “think” of her to what he might feel. It is the moment when a line is crossed and Joyce agrees to do what he can to save her. Is he secretly in love with her? In agreeing to collaborate in the withholding of a vital piece of evidence, he is, after all, committing a criminal offense and putting his entire career at risk. The motivation seems to lie deeper than simply loyalty to a friend and saving the face of the white community, just as he suspected at once that Leslie’s frenzied killing of Hammond seemed to go beyond motives of simple self-defense. Like Hammond, like Leslie, he is another character with “a secret life.” Parenthetically, one might suggest that Pauline Kael’s description of Frieda Inescourt’s portrayal of Joyce’s wife as “ineffably absurd” (Kael: 369) might be part of the point. Married to someone so frivolous and superficial, Joyce could easily be intoxicated by another woman who, beneath her respectable surface, reeks of sensuality and mystery. The lawyer’s complex character is conveyed with masterly understatement by Stephenson. When Joyce asks Leslie’s husband, Robert for authorization to buy her letter to Hammond, he somehow has to do so without arousing suspicion about what the letter contains, while impressing upon him the importance of obtaining it because its existence might complicate the jury’s response to the case. He does so while they are sharing a drink in their club; Stephenson acts the scene with such deceptive calm and authority that one can fully accept the husband’s unsuspecting acquiescence. (Herbert Marshall is very fine in this scene, too, impatiently brushing to one side what he mistakenly thinks is a legal nicety in his desire for the whole business to be over as quickly as possible.) Just the repeated rubbing of his index finger along the surface of the table conveys Joyce’s inner nervousness. It is only when he has obtained Robert’s agreement that perspiration breaks out on his forehead and, to the steward’s obvious surprise, he orders a second gin sling. Stephenson is similarly fine in his summing-up speech to the jury, where the words he finds on behalf of his client are appropriate for the occasion (“this remarkable woman ... in the sure knowledge that justice will be done....”etc.) but, through hesitations and his visible discomfort, come perilously close to sticking in his throat. In order to save Leslie he must destroy his own self-respect. The sense of strain is all too evident: He seems not to know where to look. The role of the lawyer is a crucial one in the film, for his character must carry much of the story’s psychological suspense. Stephenson’s performance is flawless. The courtroom scene was an addition to the original, and so too is the film’s most famous scene, when Leslie and her lawyer, as part of the agreement, must visit the Chinese Quarter to obtain the letter in person from Mrs. Hammond for a sum of $10,000 in cash, withdrawn secretly from her husband’s savings. Tony Gaudio’s glittering photography makes the most of the dramatic contrast between the ordered society we have so far seen and the noisy, teeming Chinese area. The scene in the Chinese store prior to the entrance of Mrs. Hammond builds up a drowsy but threatening atmosphere, reinforced by the scene’s imagery — as, for example, when Leslie is shown a pair of attractive dolls that turn out to be the handles of stilettos concealed in their sheaths — an appropriate token of the deceptiveness of appearance that is one of the film’s main themes and a disquieting omen of her subsequent fate. The air is heavy with the smoke of opium, and time seems momentarily arrested as they await with growing apprehension the forthcoming encounter. When Joyce asks for a window to be opened, the slight breeze from outside starts to rustle the wind chimes whose tinkling swells in volume in accordance with the jangling nerves of the visitors. We see a figure in dark shadow in the back of the shop. The drapes are drawn aside and Mrs. Hammond stands before us, sinewy, bedecked with jewelry, chalk-faced, and with narrowed eyes that Leslie will later liken to those of a cobra.

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Such a forthright presentation of the otherness of the Oriental runs the risk of accusations of racial stereotyping. Wyler did later say that ideally he would have preferred a Chinese actress in the role, though he did feel Gale Sondergaard was very good. The aim here, though, is surely dramatic impact more than ethnic authenticity. The key thing is the extreme contrast between the two women. It is effective and appropriate that Hammond’s Eurasian widow emerges in Leslie’s eyes as her nightmarish opposite, for the difference between the two can only sharpen Leslie’s sense of the absoluteness of her rejection by her lover. On the fateful night, it fueled an outrage so powerful that it ended in murder. It is one of the most extreme and stylized of all Wyler’s confrontations between polar opposites of character and social class. Given nothing to say in the film, Sondergaard makes the most of a chilling physical presence: the character needs no words to convey her hatred of the woman before her. The confrontation gains an additional frisson from the widow’s insistence that Leslie remove her shawl so that her face can be seen, and also that she comes nearer so that she can hand over the letter personally. As the camera moves down to Mrs. Hammond’s clenched hands, there is a momentary fear that she might be clutching a murder weapon, but it is indeed the letter which she holds and which she now throws at the heroine’s feet. The revenge sought here is one of maximum embarrassment and humiliation, and on more than a personal level. It is not simply a moment where an individual is compelled to grovel ignominiously at the feet of another but a moment when, symbolically and subversively, a respectable member of the dominant order is at the mercy of, and in obeisance to, people to whom that member has always felt superior. It is a variation of the kind of situation that has developed elsewhere between Joyce and his confidential clerk, Ong (played with implacable civility by Sen Yung). The former has all the power, prestige, and social position — even Ong’s car is comically small by comparison with that of his employer — but the latter holds all the cards, enabling him consistently to undermine his employer’s assumed social and moral superiority. The deal is concluded; Leslie and Joyce hurriedly leave. Yet the scene’s final, smoldering close-up of the widow suggests not finality but trouble still to come. Significantly, she never even looks at the money. It is during the euphoria after the trial that Leslie’s husband, Robert, learns the truth in a tensely conceived and executed sequence that reverses and darkens earlier scenes from the film, and where earlier deceits are laid bare. Previously, Joyce has managed convincingly to gloss over the importance of the letter when he has first raised the matter with Robert, but he is unable to do so now when Robert discovers almost all of his savings have been spent on the letter’s procurement. Moreover, Joyce has committed an offense that would mean disbarment if it were ever discovered. What on earth was in the letter to compel him to act in this way? Having paid $10,000 for it, Robert insists, he has a right to know. “Let him see it,” says Leslie, curtly, almost fatalistically. When Robert seems at first uncomprehending, she spells its meaning out for him in a grim recital of her long affair and of the fatal shooting. Her account now, as she paces the room and offers no excuses, seems a grisly parody of the embarrassed yet noble explanation of her behavior she had given on the fateful night. “I don’t deserve to live,” she concludes, at which point Robert, who has listened with his head in his hands for most of the confession, hurries from the room. “He’s going to forgive you,” says Joyce and Leslie sadly agrees, for now the question is whether she can forgive herself. The final scene between husband and wife is truly painful and the one in which star and director could not agree. Robert has indeed forgiven her and Leslie is resolved to do everything in her power to make him happy. A reconciliation seems possible — until

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Robert kisses her. It is noticeable even from their first scene together (when Robert rushes home after the shooting) that Leslie has a tendency to recoil involuntarily from physical contact with her husband, as if such intimacy would be too much of a reminder of her betrayal. At this crucial point she can no longer disguise her deepest feelings and, pulling away from his embrace, she has to tell him to his face the brutal truth: “With all my heart I still love the man I killed.” In the play, the line was said to the lawyer; in the film it is said directly to the husband. Bette Davis’s difficulty was that, as she put it, “I couldn’t conceive of any woman looking into her husband’s eyes and admitting such a thing. I felt it would come out of her unbeknownst to herself, and therefore she would not be looking at him” (Davis: 204). Wyler insisted that she had to say it to his face “in a desperate moment of honesty and self-flaggelation and it hits him twice as hard — and it is a terrible confession to make” (Herman: 212). If she were trying to lessen the blow, he thought, she would not have said it at all; and it would diminish the impact of the moment were she to turn away from him, particularly as prior to this point, such a gesture has tended to imply her deviousness and of having something to conceal. The whole film has been building toward a climax of faceto-face confrontation where finally telling an inconvenient truth takes precedence over saving face. Wyler’s view prevailed. “Yes, I lost a battle,” wrote Davis, “but I lost it to a genius” (204). Nevertheless, the falling-out here was an omen of the more prolonged conflict they were to endure during the filming of The Little Foxes. Wyler might have defeated Bette Davis on this issue, but unfortunately, there was no way he could defeat the Production Code, which demanded that adultery could not go unpunished and nor could murder. The film therefore ends on a climax of double absurdity, where the heroine walks out into the courtyard as if drawn by the moon towards the open gate, where she is attacked by Mrs. Hammond and the Head Boy and stabbed to death. No sooner has this happened than the assailants are apprehended by a conveniently passing policeman. The film attempts to redeem the bathos of the ending through the power of the acting — Bette Davis’s scream at the point of death is authentically blood-curdling — and the camera, which cranes back over the courtyard and toward the party guests dancing unaware in the distance before concluding with the two visual symbols that have helped draw the narrative together: Leslie’s lace, caught by a gentle breeze and flutteringly softly in a chair by the open door; and the moon as it disappears behind a cloud. What Wyler thought of another controversial element of the film — namely, Max Steiner’s omnipresent score — is unrecorded. Critical opinion seems divided between those who find it insistent and declamatory in a manner that runs contrary to the film’s subtle depiction of repressed emotions, whereas others (like myself ) seem more prepared to accept it as a stylistic convention of the period while also feeling that the music never sentimentalizes the drama, and that the taut main theme conveys very well the anguish behind the main character’s passionate temperament. Overall, it is hard to conceive how this interpretation could be bettered, no doubt because its key themes — unrequited love, social and class conflict, and the appalling consequences of a lie — are right up Wyler’s street. As a footnote, one should mention that Wyler directed a live television version of the play in 1956, which starred Michael Rennie (replacing an unavailable Paul Scofield), Siobhan McKenna, and John Mills. According to John Mills’s autobiography, the broadcast had its fair share of hazards — a gun that refused to fire, props that hindered the camera’s movement, a large painting that crashed onto the studio floor — but the production was enthusiastically received by both press and public (Mills: 331). Wyler never cared to repeat the experiment.

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The Little Foxes (1941) “Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines, for our vines have tender grapes” — Song of Solomon: 2:15 “There is a hundred times more cinema, and better cinema at that, in one fixed shot of The Little Foxes than in all the outdoor dolly shots, natural locations, exotic geography ... with which the screen so far has tried to make up for stagey origins” — André Bazin, What Is Cinema? (Vol. 1: 69)

When Sam Goldwyn’s story editor, Edwin Knopf, cautioned him against acquiring the screen rights to Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes because it was “a very caustic play,” Goldwyn is said to have snapped back, “I don’t give a damn how much it costs, buy it!” (Berg: 355). His judgment was vindicated, for the film was nominated for nine Academy Awards, his biggest-ever haul of Oscar nominations, and both a critical and commercial smash hit. In an endeavor to dilute the play’s so-called “caustic” quality, Lillian Hellman had been encouraged in her adaptation to include a new character, a liberal newspaperman, David Hewitt (Richard Carlson), to provide a love interest for Goldwyn’s new contract artist, Teresa Wright, playing Alexandra, the daughter of the main character, Regina Giddens. Love scenes never being her forte (and tiring of a play that she had exhaustively researched and re-written nine times before being satisfied), Hellman passed the final polish

Marital hell: Herbert Marshall and Bette Davis in The Little Foxes (1941).

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of these scenes to her ex-husband Arthur Kober, who was aided and abetted by Alan Campbell and Dorothy Parker. Hellman always credited Dorothy Parker as the person who suggested the title of the play. Nevertheless, the play’s harsh core and gloomy outcome remained unchanged, and a number of the actors who had played it on the Broadway stage were retained for the film, where they gave well-nigh definitive performances: Charles Dingle and Carl Benton Reid as Regina’s brothers, Ben and Oscar Hubbard, respectively, the most hated businessmen in the community; Dan Duryea as Oscar’s indolent and insolent son, Leo, whom Oscar, for purely mercenary motives, wishes to marry off to Alexandra; and Patricia Collinge as Oscar’s wife, Birdie, a Southern landowner’s daughter whom Oscar had married for her money. Herbert Marshall, making his third film for Wyler, was cast as Regina’s invalided husband, Horace Giddens. As for Regina herself, although the key role had been played triumphantly on stage by Tallulah Bankhead, Goldwyn and Wyler felt there was only one screen actress of that time who could carry off the villainy of the heroine while ensuring the audience’s fascination: Bette Davis. She might be a little young for the role of a character with a 17year-old daughter (she was 33), but this was offset by the allure of her screen persona. As her tagline had it: “Nobody’s as good as Bette when she’s bad.” It was the one occasion during the actress’s tempestuous tenure at Warner Brothers when she was allowed to be loaned out to another studio, in exchange for which Goldwyn allowed his own contracted star, Gary Cooper, to go to Warners to play Sergeant York in Howard Hawks’s film. Ironically, Bette Davis’s performance was to prove the most controversial aspect of the picture and the parting of the ways between her and Wyler, because they were to clash violently over how the part should be played. “In fact,” Davis wrote later, “I ended feeling I had given one of the worst performances of my life” (Davis: 207). Many critics, myself included, feel it is one of her best. In an interview about the play in 1939, Lillian Hellman declared that “I am representing for you the sort of person who ruins the world for us” (Bryer: 8). Set in the American South in 1900 (though, as the opening titles remind us, “little foxes have lived in all times, in all places”), the plot centers on the family machinations that develop over the construction of a local cotton mill whose anticipated massive profits will accrue from the exploitation of cheap labor. Although the business will certainly make all of the Hubbards rich, there is some early discord over who will get the biggest share. Regina, on her husband’s behalf, argues for 40 percent as his contribution is essential to keep the project and the profits in the family. “I don’t ask for things I don’t think I can get,” she adds, menacingly. The smarter of the two brothers, Ben, agrees so long as Oscar has the smallest share and his stays the same. After all, he argues, as he is a bachelor with no intention of marrying, the money will ultimately filter down to Oscar and his family anyway. Oscar is initially chagrined, but is somewhat mollified by Ben’s suggestion of a possible future marriage between Oscar’s son, Leo, and Regina’s daughter, Alexandra — a notion that seals the bargain. “Our grandmother and grandfather were first cousins,” says Oscar by way of justification, to which Regina replies, sardonically, “Yes — and look at us.” Her subsequent giggle suggests that she has no illusions about the venality of her brothers or her family. The sticking point, though, is Regina’s husband, Horace, a principled man who is now seriously ill and estranged from Regina. Will he go along with the venture? Regina has sent Alexandra, who is unaware of the darker motives, to entice Horace back home from the sanatorium where he has been convalescing. He is initially delighted to be invited back, but soon deduces the real reason behind the eagerness for his return.

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He wants no part of a venture that he deems immoral, and refuses to put up the money for Regina’s share. After learning from Leo that Horace has municipal bonds in a deposit box that would complete the financing of the deal, Oscar and Ben prevail upon Leo to steal the bonds, with the idea of eventually returning them when they have served their purpose and before they are missed. Discovering the theft, Horace tells Regina but attempts to prevent her from exploiting the situation by saying that he will confirm that he agreed to the loan, which will at least stop her from sharing in the profits. In the argument that ensues, Horace has a heart attack and Regina refuses to help him. He collapses and dies. With Horace dead, Regina can blackmail Ben and Oscar into agreeing to her having 75 percent of the profits. Otherwise, she will have them imprisoned for theft. Oscar departs in a high rage, but Ben takes the defeat philosophically, even with good humor, suggesting he may yet have something up his sleeve, as well as suspicion about how Horace died. Of all the productions that have been mounted of Hellman’s most popular play, she was to say that “the one that came closest to what I wanted was Willie Wyler’s film” (Wright: 145). As usual, the director’s strategy for bringing out the best in the theatrical material was to respect the basic structure of the original while sharpening the drama and giving the illusion of dynamic movement through judicious pacing, variety of shots, and a concentration of visual detail to amplify the dramatic effect. Some moments would be hard to match on stage: for example, the subtle way Herbert Marshall’s Horace conveys the character’s opinion of every member of the family as much through fleeting looks, barely audible sighs, and ironic smiles as through actual dialogue. One visual masterstroke is the shifting of a crucial scene between Oscar and Leo, when the latter lets slip that he has access to Horace’s deposit box at the bank. On stage, the scene played out in the living room of the Giddens’ house, but Wyler shifted it to a bathroom as the pair shave, standing back to back and facing separate mirrors. As the plot begins to formulate in Oscar’s mind for Leo to steal the bonds, the mirror shot becomes wonderfully suggestive of “like father, like son” and, above all, of human deviousness. A plot to defraud is hatched back to back rather than face to face, and is the perfect visual correlative to the characters’ oblique villainy. In her testimony for the Catherine Wyler documentary, Lillian Hellman mentioned that Sergei Eisenstein, who loved the film, thought the shaving scene was a stroke of genius that, by itself, would justify Wyler’s motion picture fame. The basic three-part structure of the play is retained, the first part ending with the shocking slap in the entrance hall, the second with the venomous argument between husband and wife at the top of the stairs, and the last with Regina ascending the staircase that has been the backdrop to so much turmoil. Displacing the expositional dialogue between two black servants that has opened the play, Wyler and Hellman constructed an opening sequence which shows Alexandra and the maid, Addie ( Jessie Grayson), returning home by buggy with provisions for the evening’s important dinner party for the businessman Mr. Marshall (Russell Hicks), who is considering a deal with the Hubbards for the construction of a new cotton mill. This opening permits Wyler to show something of the community that the Hubbards dominate, and to introduce David, a young newspaperman whose dislike of the Hubbards establishes an immediate moral barometer against which they can be measured. Further, the sequence introduces various members of the family, who lean from a window on a sunny day to greet the returning Alexandra and Addie. But much later, after the narrative mood has darkened, Regina (in the film’s very last shot) looks from a window in the dead of night to observe the pouring rain. She finally retreats into shadow behind the curtains, as if to cap this dramatic contrast to that bright, sunny window we saw earlier.

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The other major example of opening out is the film’s equivalent to the play’s secondact opening, when Wyler shows Alexandra’s visit to Baltimore to collect her father, which permits some variety of location and a welcome, temporary lightening of mood, including a bit of romantic comedy business when David accompanies Alexandra to the station in his night-shirt and overcoat, his informal and indeed indiscreet attire capped by a black bowler that he has put on his head as an afterthought for a touch of respectability. Originally, and with the approval of Lillian Hellman, Wyler had intended to set the film’s equivalent of the play’s third-act opening in the old plantation which Birdie’s family used to own before the Hubbards acquired it. Wyler conceived a picnic scene on this location, to prompt the mood of nostalgia that initially hangs over the scene. At a late stage, the director abandoned the idea; as filmed, the scene takes place in a little courtyard outside the house, where all the “good” characters (Horace, Alexandra, Birdie, Addie, and David) are assembled together for the only time, in an intimate exchange that becomes an oasis of decency amid the prevailing atmosphere of daggers-drawn duplicity. Wyler’s reason for changing the setting gives an insight into his method and the soundness of his dramatic instincts, for he thought the physical presence of the plantation might overpower the words. As he put it in an interview in 1970: “The words created pictures in your mind which if you created them on the screen too, then it would be too much” (Miller: 54). Because of his decision, nothing distracts from the impact of Birdie’s speech as, from an initially humorous recollection of a time when she had hiccups, she moves with gathering drunkenness to a fond remembrance of her mother and a recollection of her first meeting of Oscar to the abrupt revelation of her dislike of her own son, and finally to a confession of her drinking habit (to drown out the bottomless horror of her loveless marriage). Lillian Hellman is on record as saying that she thought Birdie a rather silly woman, and was surprised by audience sympathy for her. Hellman obviously underestimated the eloquence of her writing in the hands of so consummate an actress as Patricia Collinge, who penetrates to the soul of this giddy but essentially kindly person who has been made to pay dearly for her gullibility. It is the most affecting sequence of the entire film. By resisting the temptation of an elaborate visual setting for this scene, Wyler reinforced an impression that was becomingly increasingly apparent to European critics who compared him with John Ford: namely (as expressed by Fernando Rocco in the November 1951 issue of the Italian magazine Cinema), whereas Ford focuses on the myth of expansion in an external world, Wyler concentrates more on psychological problems among families that operate by feudal rules (Kern: 182). André Bazin wrote, particularly in relation to The Little Foxes, of how Wyler used the screen “as a dramatic checker board” (Volume 1: 34). Certainly, there is scarcely an interior shot that does not represent in some way a struggle for supremacy among the characters. The whole film is about property, materialist enterprise, and theft. The calculated compositions reflect calculating characters at every point in strategically advantageous or vulnerable positions within the frame. Even the furniture and other decor become part of the dramatic dynamic. For example, when the businessman Mr. Marshall is entertained after dinner with a brief Schubert recital on the piano by Birdie and Alexandra, Regina positions herself prominently on the settee so that she can intimidate an inattentive Leo with a disapproving look, and pointedly kick Ben’s foot when he noisily and restlessly stirs his spoon in his coffee. (Incidentally, the use of Schubert as an ironic cultural contrast in a context of money and greed was surely an influence on the Hollywood Bowl sequence in Billy Wilder’s classic noir thriller of 1944, Double Indemnity, where the same contrast is made. Also, the murder scene in that film — a close-up of the treacherous heroine as murder is enacted behind her — surely owes something to Wyler’s method in The Little Foxes.)

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Regina disports herself similarly on the same settee later in the film, when she has control over Horace’s life-or-death situation and deliberately does nothing. After Horace’s death, she stretches out on a sofa while dictating to Ben and Oscar the new terms of the agreement; the composition of her reclining in the foreground of the frame completely upstages Ben and Oscar, who are visually and strategically diminished by this new turn of events. Even the addition of some tie-back drapes that separate the living room from the entrance hall are used to enhance dramatic effect. In the play, when Leo wonders about Alexandra’s reluctance to go to Baltimore and thinks what he would do in her place, Alexandra tells him to mind his own business, and that she could guess what he would do. Leo replies, “Oh no, you couldn’t,” and exits. In the film, we think Leo has already gone, so that when he unexpectedly reappears from behind the drapes and speaks the line, it takes us, and Alexandra, a little by surprise. Moreover, as delivered by Dan Duryea in a manner that shows he is already close to perfecting his trademark sneer, the line has a real edge of unpleasantness and gives a sudden dark insight into Leo’s true personality. A few moments later, when Birdie is earnestly warning Alexandra not to marry Leo, we are aware of someone appearing behind the drapes and eavesdropping on the conversation (in a manner more convincingly contrived than in the play), and our worst fear is soon confirmed: it is Oscar, who overhears his wife’s attempt to sabotage his unscrupulous plans for his worthless son. The hard slap he gives Birdie when he believes Alexandra is out of earshot is the act of brutality to which the whole of the first part of both play and film has been heading. It signifies more than just marital discord: it is the hand of greed striking out at the face of compassion. Alexandra has heard Birdie’s cry of pain. In a point of view shot, Alexandra calls down the stairs to inquire what has happened. It is the first staircase shot in the film and marks the moment of Alexandra’s dawning awareness of the cruelty that lurks behind the family façade. This will be confirmed toward the end, when she will descend the staircase unnoticed as her mother and uncles viciously argue downstairs over the spoils of their agreement — when Alexandra’s father has been dead for only a few minutes. Her final scene with her mother takes place on the staircase, her mother leading the way up the stairs but Alexandra, for the first time, refusing to follow. The staircase becomes a veritable battleground of confrontation and territorial advantage as each protagonist seeks a momentary financial or psychological edge. Regina will address her brothers like a monarch from the top of the stairs, refusing to cede the dominant position and keeping them at arm’s length as she works on her husband to come in on the deal. There is a superb shot of Horace on the stairs as he watches Regina and Ben argue in the hallway and, in Otis Ferguson’s splendid phrase, “leans his weak fury against the banister” (Affron: 250). It will prompt his ferocious outburst when, mortally ill and goaded beyond endurance by Regina’s remorseless pressure, he lets fly with an anger and bitterness that has surely been fomenting for years. “Maybe it’s easy for the dying to be honest,” he says and goes on: I’m sick of you, sick of this house, sick of my unhappy life with you. I’m sick of your brothers and their dirty tricks to make a dime. There must be better ways of getting rich than building sweatshops and pounding the bones of the town to make dividends for you to spend. You’ll wreck the town, you and your brothers. You’ll wreck the country, you and your kind, if they let you. But not me. I’ll die my own way and I’ll do it without making the world any worse. I’ll leave that to you.

While listening to that tirade, Regina serenely ascends the stairs to her room before turning gracefully to Horace to deliver a response that chills the blood, even more so as it is said so calmly and in the presence of their daughter. “I hope you die,” she says. “I hope

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you die soon. I’ll be waiting for you to die.” The horror is accentuated by the way Bette Davis as Regina deliberately spaces the words for maximum pain, and Teresa Wright, as Alexandra, shrieks an anguished accompaniment, throwing herself between the two and into her father’s arms, as if trying to be a human shield warding off venomous arrows. Many viewings of The Little Foxes have never diminished the impact of that moment for me. It is one of the cruelest in all cinema. The film’s most famous staircase scene is to come; and if Eisenstein went into raptures over Wyler’s handling of the shaving scene, it is his theoretical opposite, André Bazin, who has immortalized this scene in the film as a high point of filmed theatre and cinematic miseen-scène. Prior to Horace’s heart attack, which so impressed Bazin, there have been any amount of visual and histrionic details to savor in the scene: the entrance of Regina and the moment she notices that Horace has strayed into her forbidden part of the house, an entrance that is timed as meticulously as the opening of a symphony; the shot when, at Horace’s invitation, Regina opens the deposit box and the lid divides the screen diagonally, with Horace watching in sharp focus in the background, awaiting her reaction; and the abrupt cut from the slamming of the lid to an emphatic close-up of Regina’s taut, veiled face demanding to know what it means. Then there is the relish with which (in Bette Davis’s performance) Regina sticks pins in her hat like daggers as she contemplates the revenge she can wreak on her greedy brothers who have committed the unpardonable sin of trying to outwit her; her angry walk to the window after Horace has told her his plan that will spike her planned revenge; and her cold declaration of her feelings about her disappointing marriage and her despised husband. The last is an example here of Wyler’s love of visual parallelism: for earlier in the film, Regina walked to this same window and elaborated her cherished plans about what she intends to do with her money when the deal is finalized. Now Wyler cuts to a shot of Horace in the right foreground of the frame as he begins to have his heart attack. Regina’s words seem literally to be provoking his seizure. Turning from the window and not having seen Horace’s gasping for breath, Regina returns to the settee, musing how she could never have guessed that Horace would have heart trouble so early and so bad. “I’m lucky, Horace,” she says. “I’ve always been lucky. I’ll be lucky again.” The words have the same rhythm and three-part structure as her earlier “I hope you die” speech; they work almost like an evil incantation and this time, without Alexandra’s intervention to protect him, Horace is defenseless against her verbal poison. His medicine slips from his grasp and smashes on the table, and there is no movement when he asks Regina to fetch the other bottle upstairs. This is the slice of luck she has been waiting for. “Cinema begins,” wrote Bazin, “when the frame of the screen or the proximity of the camera and the microphone serve to present the action and the actor to the best possible advantage” (Williams: 52). Small wonder he admired so much this moment in The Little Foxes, when Regina sits immobile on the sofa while her dying husband staggers from the room. As Bazin wrote: “What actor would not dream of being able to act sitting on a chair immobile before 5,000 spectators who would not miss a movement of his eyes? What theater director would not wish to be able to compel the spectator ‘in the gods’ to understand clearly the characters’ movements, to read their intentions easily at each moment of the action?” (Williams: 80). In maximizing the theatrical impact, Wyler has also paradoxically produced a moment of pure cinema, something that could not be replicated in any other form. The camera’s immobility matches the heroine’s own. Wyler unerringly focused on the essential drama of the moment, even more than the husband’s attempt to reach his medicine: namely, what is going on inside Regina’s head. In Bette Davis’s performance here,

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the eyes widen slightly as if in surprise; there is a determined tightening of the lips; the posture stiffens with tension; a slight turn of the head suggests a barely suppressed sense of anticipation; and yet everything is repressed and kept under control until the right moment. The fixed shot of Davis’s face and her position of power within the frame frustrate our attempt to see clearly what is happening behind her. Gregg Toland’s magnificent camerawork deliberately delays the full depth of focus, so that the blurring of the image in the background increases the sense of unease and gives the impression of Regina’s nebulous imagining of what is happening behind her. When Horace falls, depth of focus is restored and Regina simultaneously snaps into action, shouting for help while knowing that her luck is in and all aid will be too late. This moment is an acting, directing, and photographic tour-de-force. One of Wyler’s most eloquent early champions, Karel Reisz, thought the film “perfect” thanks to “Wyler’s achievement of a brilliantly apt fusion between pictorial style and writing,” though, in his view, it fell short of greatness because of what he thought was a certain extravagance and two-dimensional quality in the characterization (Reisz: 24). There seem to me some minor imperfections that do not, however, significantly undermine the achievement of the film. The romantic subplot is on occasion a little cloying. Meredith Willson’s score is not always appropriate, particularly the use of recycled spirituals over the opening and end credits, which seem not to belong to the world or mood of the film. (Willson found fame later, as the creator of The Music Man.) The scene toward the end of the film where David knocks Leo to the ground after the latter has accused him of hanging around the house during Horace’s last illness for purely mercenary reasons seems unsubtle and irrelevant, telling us nothing about the characters that we do not already know. It has none of that frisson of delight as when Ben, in sheer exasperation at Leo’s stupidity, swipes at the unlit cigar in Leo’s mouth, leaving an untidy mess hanging from the young man’s lips — the character in a nutshell. The racial characterizations now look very dated, to the point where Mike Nichols, in an acclaimed Broadway revival in 1967, asked the characters to be played as if they were consciously mocking the white people whom they knew to be their enemies. Hellman thought this an historical untruth but was intrigued by the idea and thought it might give the play another dimension (Bryer: 123). As it is, the parts are played straight in the Wyler film, but there is no doubt that the characters are viewed sympathetically. It is interesting that the maid Addie, finely played by Jessie Grayson, is given a key speech that Alexandra will recall at the end of the film: “There are people who eat the earth and all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it.” And it is at this point that Horace offers his own biblical quotation about the little foxes that sounds a similar warning about the world they inhabit. Bette Davis’s performance has always divided the critics. Here I am in complete agreement with Karel Reisz when he says that “she plays with a subtlety and controlled gusto which makes her at once terrifying and fascinating to watch” (Reisz: 24). Wyler wanted Davis to give the character more lightness and sensuality than Tallulah Bankhead had displayed on stage, whereas Davis thought the part could only be played as an unmitigated villain. In the end neither seemed to be fully satisfied with what they achieved. Wyler conceded in an a 1979 interview with Ronald L. Davis that “I didn’t quite succeed in getting her to play the way I wanted” (Miller: 94) and Davis recalled having an unhappy experience on the film. Yet if warmth and sensuality are absent from the performance, this is more than compensated for by the wit, shrewdness, and ruthlessness Davis found in Regina. Behind the coldness one can sense the frustration that has built up in Regina about

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her situation, which might well have received a responsive echo from women who felt a similar sense of domestic entrapment. Even as one is appalled by Regina’s behavior toward Horace, as she awaits and indeed provokes the heart condition that will kill him, one admires the way she teases and confounds her unscrupulous brothers and then in the end outsmarts them with a move even shadier and more underhand than the trick they were planning to play on her. Davis gives a performance rich in physical and behavioral detail. One thinks of the way she arches her back like an angry cat when David dares to strike a note of defiance in his response to her, or the thrilling moment early in the film when she suddenly lunges toward Oscar as he badgers her about Leo and Alexandra. The words are controlled enough (“My, you’re in a bad humor”) but the physical gesture is that of a tigress poised to strike at anyone who threatens her lair. It is the first compelling sign that this is a person who would be dangerous if crossed. There is a particularly striking moment when Regina prepares Horace’s room for his return. She catches sight of an oval portrait of herself in her youth on his desk — the woman he surely fell in love with — and then looks in a mirror to see her reflection. It is certainly the image of a woman who has changed and whose face has hardened as time has taken its toll, but it is also a premonition of what is to come, for the tight expression in the mirror returns when a dying Horace clutches her chair and gasps for breath. At that point, no other screen actress in the world could have occupied that settee with the same force and resonance, and with a regal malevolence that arises inexorably and with terrifying finality out of a life of thwarted potential. Whatever their differences over The Little Foxes, Bette Davis was never finer than in her films for Wyler, the embodiment of a ferocious vitality and intelligence kicking out frustratedly against a patriarchal order that has warped her characters’ development. Besides gender injustice, the film touches on racial injustice; and its study of the way greed erodes humanity and goodness has lost none of its potency over the years. At that time, though, there might have been another theme playing obsessively on Wyler’s mind: the old adage that all it takes for evil to flourish is for the good to do nothing. It is the theme of Addie’s outburst in the scene in the courtyard, and in the final scene, when Alexandra is reminded of it by something Uncle Ben has said, and resolves to do something about it. “Why, Alexandra, you have spirit after all, I used to think you were all sugar water,” says Regina with deceptive sweetness (it anticipates a similar moment in The Heiress when the doctor’s daughter finds her voice at last but only to stand up against a dominant parent figure). Alexandra is not to be appeased. “Addie said there were people who ate the earth and other people who stood around and watched them do it, “she says, “and just now Uncle Ben said the same thing. Really the same thing. Well tell him from me, Mama, I’m not going to stand around and watch you do it.” It is tempting to speculate that Wyler at this juncture was thinking of the darkening situation in his native Europe and of the urgency for action. Eric Rhode has perceptively noted what he called the director’s “habitual fascination with cruelty” and persuasively suggested that Wyler was consciously relating the material of The Little Foxes to “the theme of Nazi evil” (Rhode: 419–20). In that sense, Wyler’s Mrs. Miniver and the war documentaries seem a logical progression from The Little Foxes, a film that, with chilling elegance, discloses some of the ugliest aspects of human nature.

FOUR War and Its Aftermath “Aerial warfare takes place in altitudes where the oil in your camera freezes, where you have to wear oxygen masks or die, where you can’t move around too much and keep conscious, where the world below you looks like the map of another planet, where human resistance and wit are taxed to the maximum, where things happen faster than any man can think. These and many other conditions are far removed from the comforts of Stage 18 in Burbank or Culver City. This is life at its fullest. With these experiences I could make a dozen Mrs. Minivers— only much better” — William Wyler, 1943

There is a logical progression to the films made by Wyler during the war period and its immediate aftermath. Mrs. Miniver is an impassioned outsider’s view of the European conflict, begun before the conflict went global, urging involvement in the struggle, but perhaps uneasily Utopian about the middle-class society it tentatively depicts. By contrast, the two documentaries, The Memphis Belle (1944) and Thunderbolt (1944), are filmed from the heart and heat of battle, and have the raw reality and authenticity that Mrs. Miniver lacked. Wyler’s team on these documentaries included scriptwriter Lester Koenig, who was later to become a valued collaborator; composer Gail Kubik, who was to compose the score for The Desperate Hours; cameraman William Clothier, subsequently to become a top Hollywood cinematographer for directors such as William Wellman and John Ford; and editor John Sturges, who co-directed Thunderbolt and was to become a fine director in his own right. Wyler’s sound recordist, Harold Tannenbaum, was in one of the planes that was shot down in one of the bombing missions and tragically killed. Wyler himself flew on five missions, riding in a bombardier’s compartment, and on one occasion disobeying a direct order not to fly from his commanding officer, who was worried that, if the plane were to be shot down and the crew captured, Wyler, as both a Jew and the director of Mrs. Miniver (probably the most effective anti–Nazi feature of World War II), would be in serious trouble, to say the least. However, as his friend John Huston would have it, Wyler was completely fearless. He was, however, to suffer damage to his hearing during a routine flight in a B-25 to capture aerial shots of Rome: the windows were open and at the end of the flight, Wyler’s hearing was seriously affected. He had gone deaf in his right ear and only gradually recovered hearing in his left. Prior to Mrs. Miniver, Wyler had been loaned out to Twentieth Century–Fox for twelve weeks to work with screenwriter Philip Dunne on an adaptation of Richard Llewellyn’s novel about a Welsh mining village, How Green Was My Valley. Wyler was very enthusiastic about the material but the production stalled because of initial reservations from the New 92

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York front office. The project was later taken over by John Ford and turned into a hugely successful, Oscar-winning film. Wyler’s main contribution was to recommend the casting of the then twelve-year-old Roddy McDowall, whose performance was a triumph. Also, after Mrs. Miniver, Wyler was initially involved in the preparation of The North Star (1943). It had been scripted by Lillian Hellman partly as a reaction against Mrs. Miniver, which (as we shall see) she loathed. The North Star was intended as a tribute to the Russian people in their fight against the Nazi invaders. When called up for military service, Wyler had to leave the production, the direction taken over by Lewis Milestone. In retrospect, Wyler’s departure might be deemed fortunate, for despite being nominated for six Oscars, the film was to be denounced by some of the press as “Soviet propaganda,” and was to be one of the films (and everyone associated with it) to be particularly vilified during the House Un-American Activities investigations into Hollywood. Ironically, it was a movie about which Sam Goldwyn was to coin one of his most famous Goldwynisms: “I don’t care if this film doesn’t make a dime, so long as every man, woman and child in America goes to see it!” Wyler still had one film to make to conclude his Goldwyn contract and, fortunately for Goldwyn, it was a film in which (just about) every man, woman, and child in America — and beyond —did want to see: The Best Years of Our Lives. If Mrs. Miniver might lack the reality he desired, Wyler was certainly to have no qualms about his qualifications for directing Best Years. The difficult readjustment of returning veterans was something he shared.

Mrs. Miniver (1942) Mrs. Miniver was a special film for a special time — and might require special pleading. It is a sentimental and hugely effective picture in which the portrayal of an ostensibly typical middle-class English family steadfast under pressure is consciously deployed as a propagandist weapon advocating American involvement against the Nazi menace. It was to be plausibly described as “Britain’s favorite Hollywood England movie” (Richards: 176), for it was the biggest box-office film of the year in the U.K. It also broke box-office records at the Radio City Music Hall; it was the first in that theater’s history to be held over for a seventh week. For M-G-M, it was their top-grossing film of the decade, a feat Wyler was to repeat for them at the end of the 1950s with Ben-Hur. Yet Mrs. Miniver is also one of Wyler’s most controversial and problematic films, and one that arguably damaged his long-term reputation. There is an intriguing (because completely uncharacteristic) moment in Catherine Wyler’s documentary, Directed by William Wyler, which is mainly and properly a tribute but which features Lillian Hellman’s reaction to this film at a preview screening. There, like many in the audience, she had been reduced to tears but, in her case, the tears signaled frustration and disappointment. “It’s such a piece of junk, Willy,” she told her great friend, “it’s so below you.” As the comment is followed in the documentary by footage of the film’s Oscar-winning success, including Wyler’s first as best director, it could have been included simply to prove how wrong Hellman was, but it could equally be there as an honest acknowledgment of the film’s contentious status. As well as being extravagantly praised at the time (Time magazine felt it accomplished “that almost impossible feat, a war picture that photographs the inner meaning instead of the outward reality of World War II”), Mrs. Miniver was also — and has been subsequently — derided for its false portrayal of English life, a view which Wyler himself came to share

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a few years later when he had had some experience of living in England in wartime conditions. It certainly has none of the edge or intensity of a home-grown product like Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well? (1942), which urgently debates what kind of English society will emerge after the war. Finding some of the film “repulsive” in its depiction of the Minivers as “the backbone of Britain,” the Documentary News Letter (August 1942) was aghast at the audience reaction: “You can sit at the Empire and hear practically the whole house weeping — a British audience with three years of war behind it crying at one of the phoniest war films that has ever been made.” In The Spectator of July 17, 1942, Edgar Anstey described it as “unconsciously pro-fascist propaganda” because it showed that the defense of England was essentially “the defence of bourgeois privilege.” In a particularly scathing editorial in the Sunday Pictorial ( July 26, 1942), entitled “She’s a disgrace to the women of Britain,” Harry Ashbrook thought the film’s working-class characters — the station master, the maid, her boyfriend — were “ghastly caricatures” and asked, “Why resurrect this useless baggage, Mrs. Miniver from the comfortable Court pages of The Times to represent the nation at war? What sort of people do Hollywood directors think we are?” In his reference to the Court pages of The Times, Ashbrook was recalling the origin of the Mrs. Miniver character, a creation of the writer Jan Struthers, whose evocations of the heroine’s life had first appeared in October 1937. They had proved enormously popular, though even a gentle humanist like E. M. Forster had found them difficult to stomach as representations of the English national character. (See his 1939 essay “Mrs. Miniver” reproduced in Two Cheers for Democracy.) Nevertheless, one should appreciate the circumstances under which the film was made and the strategy behind its making; it can barely be understood otherwise. Wyler intended it as a propaganda movie aimed both to stiffen the resolve of those nations resisting Hitler and to move an American audience toward supporting involvement in the war. There is no doubt it worked, on both counts. Winston Churchill was famously to call the film “propaganda worth a hundred battleships,” and President Roosevelt ordered the vicar’s final sermon about why the war was being fought — a speech on which Wyler worked particularly hard with his writers — to be dropped as leaflets on occupied territories. Filming began in November 1941, before America had officially entered the war, and when the Hollywood studios were wary about being seen as taking sides in the debate about involvement, and indeed in alienating some of its foreign markets. The head of M-G-M, Louis B. Mayer, was very uncomfortable about the way the one German character — the wounded aviator who winds up in Mrs. Miniver’s back garden — was being characterized, and urged Wyler to soften the portrayal. Wyler was equally adamant that he could not do that, insisting that, given this was the only German who appeared in the film, the young man had to embody the Nazi ideology in its starkest form and thus make clear why it had to be fought and opposed. For a few days there was stalemate between the two, but after December 7, Mayer relented. As Wyler dryly put it, “Pearl Harbor came to my rescue.” One element of the film’s propagandist strategy was its romanticizing of its main characters, though as Colin Schindler persuasively observed in his book Hollywood Goes to War, this is equally true of Casablanca (1942), with which Wyler’s film could be compared for the way “it took a fictional group of people in the middle of a very real situation and treated their problems with drama and yet compassion” (Schindler: 48). Whether Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon have quite the star charisma of Bogart and Bergman is perhaps open to question. Another difference is that, in Wyler’s film, the enemy is almost entirely unseen, which leaves the film little in the way of dramatic conflict. It has one dramatic masterstroke

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(the unexpected death of the daughter-in-law during an air-raid), but for the most part, it has to sustain our attention through the essential likeability of the characters. If audiences at the time were moved by the film — and they undoubtedly were — it was probably because they found the characters sympathetic; and also because the film, although not thought to be “real,” nevertheless brought realities to mind. Audiences could no doubt readily identify the false notes in the depiction of English middle-class life but they could also empathize with universal feelings that the film dramatizes very well: the renewed intensity of family cohesion in times of crisis, the heightened anxiety of absence, the pain of loss. All this is observed with discretion and an absence of melodramatic exaggeration. Wyler’s visual restraint at key dramatic moments is often very telling: for example, his lingering shot of the empty dinner table after the Minivers’ son, Vin, has been called away on active service concisely signifies the forthcoming disruption of normality and family life. There is a shot of Vin’s fiancée, Carol, and Mrs. Miniver with their backs to the camera looking up the stairs toward Vin’s room, both involuntarily flinching as they hear the click of his door opening — a signal that he is about to leave them for a mission from which he might not return. The shot is recalled later in the film but with a twist: the camera placement is the same, but the room is now suffused with darkness, and when the click of the door is heard, it is Mr. Miniver who appears, coming from the room in which Carol, and not Vin, has died. The camera placement alone brings subtle and understated irony and poignancy to the moment. As well as responding to subtleties in the direction, audiences of the time would have taken pleasure from codes and conventions that they recognized from similar films. They would have been less inclined to resist Mrs. Miniver for its “phoney realism” than to see it as a superior example of a kind of film they much enjoyed. As H. Mark Glancy has demonstrated in his fine book When Hollywood Loved Britain, the war years gave rise to a number of Hollywood films that celebrated what the filmmakers saw as the quaintness and charm of the English way of life. The producer of Mrs. Miniver, Sidney Franklin, was making a specialty of such films; his others in the same vein include Goodbye Mr. Chips (1939), Waterloo Bridge (1940), Random Harvest (1942), and The White Cliffs of Dover (1944). Also, the lineup of writers on Mrs. Miniver was particularly strong, and experienced in delivering the material in a way that audiences appreciated. It consisted of James Hilton, the author of Lost Horizon, Goodbye Mr. Chips, and Random Harvest; and George Froeschel and Claudine West, who had scripted Frank Borzage’s courageous film of life in prewar Germany, The Mortal Storm (1940). Later, with Arthur Wimperis, the pair adapted Random Harvest. Providing uncredited assistance on the film was R.C. Sherriff, who had scripted another key movie of this era that was a hymn to the English character, Anatole Litvak’s This Above All (1942), but was most famous for his classic play about the First World War, Journey’s End (1930). Indeed, as Mark Glancy shrewdly noted, one can sense Sherriff ’s hand in the famous scene in Mrs. Miniver when wife and husband read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with their children in their home shelter while bombs are dropping overhead, because there is a similar scene in Journey’s End where one of the characters seeks comfort from Lewis Carroll’s fantasy as a relief from the horror of the world outside. The “Alice” scene stayed in the minds of many who saw Mrs. Miniver, not as evidence of its fantasizing and sentimentality but as proof of its emotional authenticity. “To many of us who had lived in England through six long years of war and gone about our ordinary routine as well as we might,” wrote the distinguished critic C. A. Lejeune (Mass-Observation at the Movies: 16), “there is a certain parallel in the scene in Mrs. Miniver and our memories of wartime nights’

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entertainment. For the men and women of this island ... the pictures have been a sort of Alice in Wonderland. They have kept our spirits up.” Why, though, did Mrs. Miniver strike a particular chord with audiences at that time? As usual, Wyler gets the best out of his collaborators, and his mise-en-scène rarely fails to bring out the maximum dramatic value of a situation. What he also brought was a sincere engagement with the material, which audiences may have sensed. Mrs. Miniver was never just a typical studio project. For Wyler, it went to the heart of the matter. So what if he might not have caught the nuances of the English class system? His aim was larger than that. As he put it, “as a European and a Jew,” he believed passionately in the film’s message and in the importance of getting that message across. This comes over most explicitly in the vicar’s final sermon on what the war is about. At the end the camera tilts up though the wrecked roof of the church and, as the congregation sings “Onward Christian Soldiers,” we see a flight of bombers winging across the sky, implicitly on a mission to Berlin. In other hands, this might come over as a crude rhetorical flourish but, viewed from a later perspective, it seems to me a very moving indication of where Wyler really wants to be: with his camera at the heart of the action against the enemy. It is a flash-forward of future intent. By the time he had won his Oscar for Mrs. Miniver, Wyler was in England and helping the war effort as a major in the Army Air Corps. Mrs. Miniver begins with a scrolling prologue that establishes both tone and theme. It reads: “This story of an average English middle-class family begins with the summer of 1939; when the sun shone down on a happy, careless people, who worked and played, reared their children and tended their gardens in the happy, easy-going England that was so soon to be fighting desperately for her way of life, and for life itself.” Until the abrupt and ominous final statement, the prologue is an evocation of an idyllic tranquil life, far removed, one might have thought, from the prevailing mood in England in 1939. Yet at the end of his classic account of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia (1937), George Orwell returns home to England and wonders whether anything short of the sound of bombs would wake the nation from its political slumber. There is a slight ambiguity in the prologue in its reference to a “happy, careless” [my emphasis] people. This might suggest “carefree” in the way that Mr. and Mrs. Miniver recall the passage from Lewis Carroll about the carefree days of childhood; or it might suggest complacency, of a people not being fully aware of the threat being posed to their way of life until it is almost too late. The prologue brings an underlying tension to the opening scenes, where one is torn between admiration for people trying to continue with their normal lives under the looming cloud of possible war or irritation at a class-bound society concerned with inessentials about status, when social cohesion is the urgent priority. In this context, the prologue to the English “middle-class” is very significant. Glancy thought it the first time the English “middle-class” had been identified as such in a Hollywood film. In the stories, the Minivers had been on a slightly more elevated plane than they are in the film: not quite aristocracy but, in E. M. Forster’s phrase, “coming out of the top drawer but one.” In Wyler’s film they are somewhat lower than that. Admittedly, with their large house, maid and cook, one could question the accuracy of how representative the Minivers actually are, but it is arguably the symbolism of their status that is more important to Wyler than its social authenticity. In other words, the Minivers are the bridge between the upper-class snobbery of Lady Beldon (Dame May Whitty), whose niece Carol (Teresa Wright) is to fall in love with the Minivers’ son, Vin (Richard Ney), and the working-class humility of the stationmaster, Mr. Ballard (Henry Travers), whose homegrown rose is in

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impudent competition against Lady Beldon’s rose, which has won the competition at the village fair year after year. Significantly, Ballard’s rose is called the “Mrs. Miniver” because of his admiration and affection for his neighbor. It is, he says, “the product of breeding, budding, and horse manure — if you’ll pardon the expression, ma’am.” The rose unites the strengths of the different social strata and becomes in itself a symbol of both beauty and social unity. The opening stretch of the film is genial social comedy, essentially built around two guilty pleasures and gentle deceptions: Mrs. Miniver’s extravagant purchase of a new hat (an object even more bizarre than the one she is already wearing) and her concealment of the purchase from her husband until an opportune moment presents itself; and Mr. Miniver’s similar purchase of a new car and his concealment of such extravagance from his wife until he judges the time is right. During all this somewhat labored period of attempted endearment (Wyler will do much better with the opening of The Big Country by using an incongruous new hat as a means of eliciting comedy, revealing character, and establishing a society) we are also introduced to other significant characters, notably the vicar (Henry Wilcoxon), whom Mrs. Miniver will meet on the train and who will make a powerful reappearance at the end of the film; and Lady Beldon, who is not slow to exhibit her social prejudices but whom we are clearly invited to see as amusing rather than appalling. We are also introduced to the Minivers’ two younger children, Toby and Judy (Christopher Severn and Clare Sandars), who manage to avoid the mawkishness of many M-G-M infants via skillful deployment for comedy, counterpoint, and contrast. As an example of humor, one might cite the moment when Vin almost flattens Toby against the pew in his excitement to catch a sight of Carol in the opposite row: the comedy here is similar to the humor of the early church scene in Friendly Persuasion. Later, however, there is a striking moment when the family emerges from its shelter to view their bombed-out living room and young Toby suddenly lets out a short laugh, as if he cannot quite grasp what has happened, but as if the incongruous awfulness of what he sees produces this instinctive reaction. It is one of the sharpest pieces of observation in the film, rather like that moment in Arthur Penn’s The Left-Handed Gun (1958), when the sheriff is blown out of one of his boots by the force of a gun blast and a child laughs uncomprehendingly at the oddly comic sight of this empty boot in the middle of a street. Children are suddenly brought face-to-face with adult brutality and destructiveness, and they can hardly believe or know how to respond appropriately to what they see. To begin with, the film’s tone is cozy and arguably a little flat dramatically. The neatest pieces of comedy come at the end of the opening exposition, when the wife’s coy revelation “I had a rose named after me today” is deflated by the husband’s pointing out, in a tone that mockingly mimics her coyness, that she has forgotten to switch off the light in the drawing room. Wyler then pans to Mrs. Miniver’s new hat perched jauntily on the bedpost, before fading to black — a neat rounding-off of how the whole sequence has begun and of confirming a small domestic victory. It is a deft way of signaling the film’s feminine emphasis, which, for Hollywood war movies of the time, was original and unusual. Elsewhere the sprinkling of “darlings” in the script becomes a little cloying, and the closeups of Greer Garson seem less like Wyler close-ups for dramatic effect and more like MG-M close-ups to emphasize the glamor of its star and what Variety called her “knee-weakening smile.” This was Garson’s finest hour, an opportune moment in her career when she stepped into the space vacated by Norma Shearer, who had turned down the role because she did not want to be cast as the mother of a 20-year-old son. Often partnered

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with Walter Pidgeon, who could expertly convey calm integrity without seeming sanctimonious, Garson represented to audiences of that time what David Shipman later described as “an ideal of nobility and matronhood, clear-browed, capable and unruffled” (Shipman, Volume 2: 235). Nothing exemplified Garson’s screen persona more strikingly than her sequence with the wounded German flier. In some derisory reviews, commentators say Mrs. Miniver “captured” or “overpowered” the flyer. In fact, she does neither. She is shocked when discovering the young man lying hidden under some bushes, and even more so when the man stirs (and stares). At this, she runs in credible panic back to the house, with the German in pursuit. She will then give him food at the point of a gun. It is only after he has collapsed unconscious that she is able to take the weapon from him, hide it, and phone the police. It is the most dramatic confrontation in the film — indeed, the only confrontation in the film — and Garson has to convey a multitude of emotions which she does convincingly: fear for her life and for the lives of her children, who are asleep upstairs, but also a determination to protect them; yet also some initial compassion for the person before her who is hurt and hungry, and quite possibly reminds her of her own son. She has not heard from Vin for five days and is beginning to fear that he too might have been hurt or shot down. If her compassion toward the German might seem a little cloying, one should remember that her behavior could subconsciously represent a projection and a hope of how her own son might be treated if he were in a similar situation. Her attitude changes only when the young Nazi shows no regret for the war atrocities committed, forecasts ultimate victory, and shouts at her in German, at which point she strikes him. It is an instinctive act of retaliation and rejection but the actress skillfully conveys apprehension behind the anger. At that moment, the face of the enemy is threateningly near, and it is a young face, determined, dedicated, and defiant. The character is a concise and effective representation of the Nazi mentality that Wyler wanted to get across and condemn, but the youth seems monstrously misguided rather than a monster himself. In the tense and tentative interaction between the two before this outburst, one can sense a momentary shared humanity which makes the German’s final ravings all the more shocking. As Eric Rhode shrewdly put it, “This scene intimates that war symbolizes the destructive impulse in everyone” (Rhode: 421). However contrived the confrontation might seem, the scene is the most suspenseful of the film, played out quietly in seeming real time. Helmut Dantine’s intense performance as the flier, seemingly reconciled to his doom, ironically imbues the character with greater depth and passion than Mrs. Miniver’s own son, who is rather thinly characterized and colorlessly played by Richard Ney, who at the time was only ten years younger than the leading actress playing his mother. At 33, Garson was worried that she might be a bit young to be playing the mother of a student at Oxford, but her fears would have been allayed — or maybe increased — when she fell in love with Ney, who was apparently more charismatic off-screen than on. Sensitive to the possible incongruity, Louis B. Mayer prevailed on the pair to postpone any news of their forthcoming marriage until after the film’s theatrical run. Vin comes across as appropriately callow when he tells his parents of how Oxford has given him a social conscience, but then looks merely naive and insensitive when he continues to spout his radical ideas in front of the family’s nonplussed maid without seeming to notice the contradiction. He is quickly upstaged by the arrival of Lady Beldon’s niece, Carol, who has come to ask the Minivers if they will prevail upon Mr. Ballard not to enter his Miniver rose against her aunt’s in the village fair: he might win, and upset years of tradition. This

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sets Vin off again on the theme of class inequity, but Carol undercuts his radical fervor with a simple question, “But do you do anything about it?” She does volunteer work in the London slums, which might not be much but is at least a social contribution. As she says, “A little action is required from time to time.” Carol is played by Teresa Wright, who was incomparable at projecting a luminous decency and goodness on screen. It is no accident that these words — the most significant in the film so far — are put into the mouth of the story’s most sympathetic character. Although seeming to be about another topic, the words really allude to the war and the necessity for involvement; and although addressed explicitly to Vin, they are implicitly aimed at America. One thinks of W. H. Auden’s lines in stanza 20 of his great poem, “Spain,” when he suggests that tomorrow there will be time for walks by the lakes and summer bike rides through suburban England, but all that must be put on hold to confront the desperate present: “today the struggle.” The necessity of action is given an indelible emphasis through the film’s most powerful and painful narrative twist. We have been encouraged to share Mrs. Miniver’s anxiety about her husband away at Dunkirk and her apprehension for Vin’s safety during his active service against the enemy, but it will be Carol who is to be killed during a bombing raid. The impact is devastating, and audiences at the time must have felt the blow as something akin to the death of Bambi’s mother. It is not only a far greater shock because Carol has seemed a much more likeable and sympathetic character than Vin, but it also brings the war much closer to home. This will in essence form the core of the vicar’s sermon in the ruined church, which had a profound impact on audiences of the day. This war is not simply a struggle between soldiers in uniform but a war of the people; it is being fought not simply on the battlefield but in cities, villages, factories, and farms; and, as the vicar puts it, “in the heart of every man, woman, and child who loves freedom.” He goes on: Well, we have buried our dead, but we shall not forget them. Instead, they will inspire us with an unbreakable determination to free ourselves and those who come after us from the tyranny and terror that threaten to strike us down. This is the people’s war. It is our war. We are the fighters. Fight it, then. Fight it with all that is in us. And may God defend the right.

The speech belongs in the same anti–Fascist category as Chaplin’s famous concluding speech in The Great Dictator (1940) and Joel McCrea’s “Keep the light burning, America!” speech at the conclusion of Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940). All three were rhetorical displays essentially directed at alerting American audiences to a desperate European situation whose outcome would undoubtedly affect their own future. However dated they might seem now, these moments do reflect the urgency of the times — and post–Pearl Harbor, the speech in the Wyler film carried particular weight. The scene also contains one of the film’s most poignant and pointed symbolic moments, when Vin will cross over to join Lady Beldon in her church pew. She has been standing alone in her grief, but social distinctions are now dissolved in favor of a common humanity and purpose, and the feeling of a nation united and pulling together. For all the criticism of what Leslie Halliwell was to call the film’s “false sentiment, absurd rural types and melodramatic situations,” Mrs. Miniver achieved what it set out to achieve. It touched the hearts of millions and was positively Churchillian in its boosting and bolstering of national morale. Let the last representative word go to a 37-year-old housewife from Huddersfield, Yorkshire, who gave the following reasons to Mass-Observation to account for her love of the film: “For the beauty and charm of Miss Greer Garson, and the pride it made me feel in being British” (280).

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The Memphis Belle (1944); Thunderbolt (1944) With John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro (1944) and John Ford’s The Battle of Midway (1944), The Memphis Belle is the most celebrated American documentary of World War II. It had the novelty of color footage, Wyler’s first film in Technicolor and highly unusual for war footage of that time (George Stevens’s remarkable color footage of the D-Day landings was not to come to light until many years after the event.) Its most striking feature, though, was its immediacy and authenticity. It was screened in the presence of President Roosevelt, who insisted it be shown in movie theaters throughout America as an inspiration and incentive to the American people to redouble the war effort. Accordingly, Paramount took on its distribution and The Memphis Belle was shown in over a thousand cinemas across the country. It was also the first film ever to reviewed on the front page of The New York Times (April 14, 1944), a recognition of the film’s importance as a record of the times. “This is a battlefield,” says narrator Eugene Kern at the beginning of the film, “a battlefront like no other in the long history of mankind’s war.” As he speaks, the camera roams across typical English countryside, but a countryside that is quite different from that depicted in Mrs. Miniver, for it has a runway and a line of B-17 bombers being readied for the day’s mission. By 1943, as the narrator puts it, “their island has been changed into a giant airfield.” A typical working morning is briskly shown: the ground crew checking their equipment; the morning briefing. This particular morning of May 15, 1943, is of great significance, as it is the day on which the 324th Bomb Squadron of the U.S. Army Air Corps is to launch a bombing raid on the German industrial base at Wilhemshaven, and also because it will be the 25th and final mission of a B-17 bomber that has been named “The Memphis Belle.” The members of the crew are individualized only sketchily: name, age, where they are from, former profession, etc.— essentially to give the impression of collective rather than individual action, and also to be representative of similar young men in parallel deeds. The Memphis Belle crewmen are symbols of youthful courage and idealism engaged in a worthy cause. The narration is terse and undemonstrative, sometimes slipping into a kind of internal monologue to convey the feelings of the men. “Sometimes your face turns white,” the narrator says, evoking the response of a combatant on learning the nature of the mission. At other times it is either fatalistic (“When you come back ... if you come back....”) or bluntly factual, as, for example, when describing the cold you experience when you are flying at 25,000 feet (“Take off your glove and you lose some fingers....”). We also learn of the strategy behind the mission: the use of the blue force as a diversion; the use of the green force to bomb Hanover, drawing some of its air power away from other positions to defend that area; and the use of the white force against the main target and to fulfill the central task of the task of the mission, which is the bombing of Germany’s industrial heartland. The most exciting section of the film is footage of aerial combat, which must have struck audiences at the time as extraordinary. In his review in The Nation (April 15, 1944), James Agee referred to some of the shots as “superhuman” and Wyler himself succinctly stated the difficulty: “You had half a second to catch a shot of a German plane before it was gone, having taken a shot at you” (Turner: 13). Deadly puffs of black smoke in the sky indicate enemy flak; trails of vapor inevitably alert the enemy of your approach. We see the crew don oxygen masks, and ice on the windows as the planes climb higher. Effective use of simulated dialogue (which was dubbed in later) reinforces the impression, as Agee put it, that “everything is seen, done, and experienced as if from inside of one or another of the men in the plane.” The sight of one of the planes in distress and spinning out of control

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prompts instinctive shouts of help, encouragement, and urgings of their comrades to eject. However, the sequence will close on a fade to black as a plane is surrounded by enemy aircraft and has to be left to its fate. The film cuts back to the waiting ground crew who, in the parlance of the time, are “sweating out the mission”: that is, anxiously wondering about the fate of their colleagues in combat and readying themselves for the planes’ return (for example, a colored flare will mean wounded aboard). As the planes return and are counted in, and an emergency blood transfusion is performed on one of the crew, the narrator comments that the men of the Memphis Belle will all get the Purple Heart. Following a shot of a prone combatant on a stretcher, the narrator adds, with grim compassion, “And this man too — posthumously.” There are spectacular shots of the Memphis Belle as it touches home soil. We seem to share the sensation of landing. One of the crew kisses the ground as he disembarks — one thinks back subliminally to the narrator’s earlier reference to “the friendly soil of England”— before kissing the plane. The film concludes with the visit to the airfield of the King and Queen of England and their being presented to the crew. It might have been this that prompted Agee to observe that The Memphis Belle was one of the documentaries “with which we can for the first time look the English in the eye.” In his pioneering book, The Liveliest Art, Arthur Knight described these documentaries — he was thinking of Huston, Ford and Wyler — as “masterpieces of on-the-spot war reporting” and evoked their impact on audiences at the time: Perhaps because they were created by civilian soldiers rather than by the military itself, they never suggested that war was a heroic, glamorous business. It was always a means — a nasty, sordid, murderous but necessary means to a vital end — the preservation of democracy. What was even more laudable, the democracy that they extolled was implicit in the films themselves, ingrained in the spirit of the men who made them [Knight: 253].

The classic status of The Memphis Belle has tended to overshadow appreciation of Wyler’s other war documentary of that year, Thunderbolt, which he co-directed with John Sturges. Timing was undoubtedly a factor here. When The Memphis Belle appeared in the early months of 1944, the war was progressing promisingly for the Allies, but a film that highlighted the bravery and sacrifice of American servicemen abroad was still seen as so essential a boost to homefront morale that the president urged release. By contrast, when Thunderbolt was shown later in 1944, the tide had turned decisively in favor of the Allies and the propagandist value of the film was correspondingly less urgent. When it was screened before military personnel at the Pentagon, the senior officer in command, General Arnold, turned to Wyler at the end and asked, “What’s this picture for?” According to John Sturges, Wyler, who at that time was still severely traumatized by the damage to his hearing, was momentarily dumbstruck and could eventually only utter a few words in response. In the event, the film was temporarily shelved and given only a limited release in 1947, as a recruitment incentive. As well as timing, another difference between the two documentaries, which might have disadvantaged Thunderbolt, was their location and the nature of the missions being filmed. The Memphis Belle is set on Allied soil in the U.K. and concerns a mission that involves aerial combat. Thunderbolt deals with an aspect of the Italian campaign during a mission that is essentially strategic: the bombing of the transport network in order to cut off the Nazis from their supply lines. An earlier bombing mission targeting an enemy stronghold at Cassino has been described as “the wrong use of air power” because it has not

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achieved the objective of allowing the Allied infantry to advance. A better deployment of air power is the exploitation of its ability to get behind enemy lines and cut off supplies by bombing lines of communication. The objective is no less important than in The Memphis Belle but arguably less exciting and emotionally engaging. Even the narrator notes that the ground war seems remote and that the airmen never see the face of the people they are attacking, which occasionally makes for a rather chilling detachment: “Give her a few squirts ... might well kill someone....” “the train’s burning nicely now....” If equally necessary as the tasks shown in Memphis Belle, the action in Thunderbolt seems less heroic, but perhaps more ruthless. The structure of Thunderbolt is also more diffuse. Because the B-47 aircraft only had room for a pilot, an engine, and a bomb on either wing, Wyler and his camera crew (unlike in The Memphis Belle) were not able to accompany the men on their mission. Automatic cameras had to be situated at various strategic positions on the aircraft, and the action they captured edited afterwards. Wyler would supplement that film with footage he could film on the ground, such as the moment when Allied troops entered Rome. It means that an audience’s identification with the particular mission is less strong, and the narrative tension is certainly less sustained. For example, when in The Memphis Belle, the film cuts back from the aerial combat to the ground crew awaiting the men’s return, the emotional intensity is maintained because we can still feel the anxiety and apprehension of the crew on the ground. In Thunderbolt, however, when a similar transition occurs, the dramatic mood is broken because we see the men on the ground relaxing, swimming in the sea, and even getting drunk. The effect is less one of relief than of anti-climax. Still, there is some remarkable footage in Thunderbolt. The early shots of a bombedout Italy and of children roaming what once were streets and “seeing things that were not meant for children’s eyes” (we see a decaying corpse) foreshadow the neo-realism of Roberto Rossellini. There are moments of horror that bring home the grim reality of war: we see hurriedly assembled graves by the roadside and the bodies of dead German soldiers as the Allies advance through Italy; a B-47 unexpectedly goes up in flames prior to a safe landing and the men on the ground have to beat a hasty retreat, unable to assist their comrades nor ever to account for why the disaster happened. When Thunderbolt was finally given a limited release by Monogram Pictures in 1947, it was reviewed, predictably enough, by James Agee in The Nation (August 30) who praised its “many incredibly fine aerial shots” and declared that it was “by a long shot, the best of the movies reviewed above” (which, for the record, included Life with Father, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Frieda, and Black Narcissus). It boasted a brief introduction from bomber pilot James Stewart, explaining that the film had been made in 1944, adding (a trifle smugly?) “ancient history.” It would be fair to say that, for Wyler, the subject of his film was anything but “ancient history.” The significance of what men such as these had fought for and the kind of free world they had risked and sacrificed their lives to defend was still a burning issue. In his first postwar film, The Best Years of Our Lives, Wyler was to confront such issues directly, making the most intensely felt, personal, and celebrated movie of his career.

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) The critical reputation of The Best Years of Our Lives has fluctuated over the years. Today it is possibly best remembered by film academics for André Bazin’s theoretical and aesthetic rhapsodizing over the eloquence of Gregg Toland’s deep-focus photography (aston-

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ishingly, one of the few elements of the film that was not nominated for an Academy Award); and for the unstinting admiration of Wyler’s cinematic peers and successors, such as Billy Wilder, David Lean, John Frankenheimer, and Jean-Pierre Melville (who told Volker Schloendorff that it was his idea of the perfect film). In the most recent ten-yearly poll conducted by the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound (September 2012) of the Ten Best Films ever made, it was pleasing to see Best Years appearing in the list put together by a modern master like Francis Ford Coppola, who knows something about quality epic American filmmaking. Even at the time, following the initial rave reviews, its Oscar-winning success, and huge box-office popularity (in the U.K., The Best Years of Our Lives made more money than Gone with the Wind ), a critical reaction set in against the film from influential commentators such as James Agee, Robert Warshow, Andrew Sarris, and Manny Farber, who, with different degrees of vehemence, raised objections about aspects of its dramatic development and its alleged political evasiveness. It was attacked by the political Right for its traces of communism, though it is hard to see how the most popular Hollywood film of the decade could also be un–American. The film’s less than flattering observation of the occasional insensitivity and imperceptiveness of the banking profession would probably strike an even more resounding chord today than it did then. Still, Wyler was being entirely serious when he suggested in 1947 that the activities of HUAC and the political climate of the Cold War would make

Home sweet home: a dutiful wife (Myrna Loy) attends to her drunken husband (Fredric March) after a night on the town in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).

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it almost impossible for a film like Best Years of Our Lives to be made in the way he had done only a year before. It was attacked by the political Left for the narrowness of its social focus; for softening the harsh contours of MacKinlay Kantor’s original novel; and for its so-called facile ending, which Karel Reisz, however, properly suggested might be perhaps “as much a hopeful gesture as a box-office concession” (Reisz: 28). It is perhaps unreasonable to demand of the film a political analysis of postwar American society of a kind that was not within its intention or province. Although Best Years has compelling things to say, it was never intended as a doctrinaire tract but a humanist observation of a facet of American life at that time, which Wyler, because of his war experience, felt confident that he knew, understood, and could communicate. One of the most interesting contemporary responses to the film came from the great German novelist Thomas Mann, who was living in the USA during the war and who might, for that reason, have been unusually receptive to what one might call the spirit of the film and its evocation of the postwar environment. In a letter dated October 10, 1947, to his friend Agnes Meyer, who had been highly critical of the film, Mann leapt to its defense. “It belongs among the finest things of its kind to come my way,” he wrote, “unsurpassed in its naturalness, profoundly decent in its opinions, brilliantly acted, and full of genuinely American life.” He went on: The difficulties of readjustment to civilian life by the returning soldiers are portrayed with discretion, humor, and kindness; the women are touching, except for the one vulgar creature who belongs in the general scheme; the men as individuals, with their class-shaped destinies, are completely true to life — as the world to which they return is true to life. Wasn’t it permissible to sound the note of tragedy, that every time the boys come back, the ideals for which the war was fought have been betrayed and sold out? [Mann: 391–2].

Over and above his high estimation of the film, Mann puts his finger on salient features of its themes and mood. I am thinking particularly of his reference not simply to the theme of readjustment but to the “difficulties” of readjustment, which is an important refinement of that theme; of his emphasis on the returning combatants’ “class-shaped” destinies, which will be a major theme and a significant difference between the three men; of his distinction between the male/female characterizations, which are bold and unconventional; and of his suggestion of the “tragedy” beneath the film’s surface, which might modify its ostensible optimism. A later critic, Eric Rhode, who was uncommonly perceptive about Wyler’s films of this period, was one of the few to have noticed that, as he put it, “a mood of dismay permeates the whole film and even touches its ironic title” (Rhode: 422). The actual phrase that constitutes the title is used only once in the film, and in a distinctly unflattering context, by the wife, Marie (Virginia Mayo), of her ex-serviceman husband, Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), when she is walking out on him. “I gave you the best years of my life,” she claims, and the phrase is doubly tainted by her dishonesty, for her implication that she has been patiently waiting for Fred’s return has been contradicted by ample evidence of a string of lovers during his absence. This character, incidentally, is “the vulgar creature” Mann is referring to in his letter and who “belongs in the general scheme”; and indeed Wyler was to say that the main purpose of this character was allegorical, a reflection of the kind of people with no interest in anything outside their own problems and having a good time. “These were the people who patronized black markets during the war,” wrote Wyler, “never gave blood to the Red Cross, bought no War Bonds, did no war work, yet ... considered themselves 100 percent Americans” (Koszarski: 108). With the benefit of hindsight, one can see now

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how prescient the film was about the postwar mood of the country, catching the anxiety behind the relief. The initial impetus for the project had come from an article in Time magazine (August 7, 1944) entitled “The Way Home,” which dealt with the impressions and experiences of ex-servicemen on furlough or home from the war and having to adjust to civilian life. At the instigation of his wife, Frances, Goldwyn had begun contemplating a film on the theme and commissioned the novelist and war correspondent, MacKinlay Kantor to write a 50-page screen treatment. To Goldwyn’s dismay, Kantor submitted a 250-page novel in blank verse entitled Glory for Me. In the meantime, Wyler had returned from the war owing Goldwyn one more film to conclude the terms of his contract. Goldwyn suggested several projects, and particularly the fantastical comedy, The Bishop’s Wife, thinking Wyler might welcome a change of pace after his war experience. But Wyler was immediately drawn to the Kantor subject. “I knew of no subject which was as important to me,” he said, “for I was just about to become a civilian myself.” When Kantor’s attempt to fashion a script from his novel that satisfied Goldwyn was deemed a failure, Goldwyn engaged Robert Sherwood, a Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist and screenwriter who seemed to have all the qualifications required. Quite apart from the literary prowess evident in a play like The Petrified Forest and Sherwood’s co-authorship of the screenplay for Rebecca, the writer also had the relevant war experience, having been head of the overseas division of the Office of War Information and an aide and scriptwriter for President Roosevelt. In outline, the Kantor novel provided the basis for the subsequent film. This is still the story of three war veterans, an infantry sergeant, Al Stephenson (Fredric March), an Air Corps bombardier, Fred Derry, and a naval seaman Homer Parrish (Harold Russell), who meet on an Air Transport Command plane taking them back to their home town of Boone City (modeled on Cincinnati, Ohio) where they will endeavor to pick up the threads of their former lives. Al, a successful banker, has a wife, Milly (Myrna Loy), and two children who are now young adults, his daughter, Peggy (Teresa Wright), and his son, Rob (Michael Hall). Fred is returning to a wife, Marie, whom he married in a whirlwind romance of twenty days while he was stationed in Texas. Homer is returning to his parents and younger sister, Luella (Marlene Aames), and also to his childhood sweetheart, Wilma (Cathy O’Donnell). Wyler was committed to honoring what he saw as the honesty of the basic material, insisting, for example, that the clothes the characters wore should look authentically ordinary and unglamorous in a manner appropriate to the immediate postwar period and the characters’ social milieu. And he agreed with Gregg Toland on a photographic style aiming for as much simple realism as possible, with no softly diffused backgrounds and with a minimum of makeup for the actors. However, in adapting the Kantor story for the screen, Wyler and Sherwood were to make a number of significant changes, two of which involved some reconfiguration of the original. Unlike in the treatment, Marie’s infidelity will only be disclosed well into the narrative, which allows the film to develop an important contrast between her and Peggy (with whom Fred will fall in love), and which is essentially a contrast between two different attitudes to life, the one self-serving and opportunistic, the other more compassionate and understanding. The other major change was in the characterization of Homer. In the novel, he is described as “spastic” (Kantor: 14) as a result of his war injuries, which both Wyler and Sherwood thought might be difficult for an actor to bring off on screen. The solution came to Wyler on watching a training film called Diary of a Sergeant, which featured a

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former paratrooper, Harold Russell, who had lost both hands to dynamite, but who had been fitted with hooks that he could now manipulate very effectively to perform most ordinary and domestic tasks. “He had a wonderful face,” wrote Wyler, “which expressed strength, courage and great faith in the future” (Koszarski: 107). After meeting Russell, Wyler and Sherwood were agreed that they wanted him for the role of Homer, because he could bring a reality to the part that no actor could. Indeed, when Wyler discovered that Goldwyn had begun sending Russell for acting lessons, he was livid and instructed him not to go. He had seen enough in the documentary to be reassured that Russell could give him the truth he wanted. Vindication for Wyler and Sherwood’s choice of Russell is apparent from the very beginning of the film. When Homer has to sign a form by using his hook to hold the pen, the desk sergeant’s surprise and shock must have been equivalent to that of an audience on first seeing the film, a shock extended when Homer has to steady the paper with his left and reveals he has lost both hands. “I’ll do it for you,” says the desk sergeant, to which Homer replies jokingly, “What’s the matter, you think I can’t spell my own name?” When the desk sergeant starts to explain, Homer replies, “I know, Sarge,” giving him a quick smile. Several hours earlier he sat in stoical silence after being slighted by another serviceman unaware of his injuries (“What’s the matter, sailor, tired or something?”) when help has been required for the removal of a ladder from the room. Homer’s repetition of the phrase, “What’s the matter?” suggests that the rebuke might still be preying on his mind, just as his quick smile and reassurance to the desk sergeant show that, in his circumstances, he is quick to pick up the difference between the earlier ignorant thoughtlessness and the sergeant’s awkward kindness. It is a potent cameo of observation. The camera is precisely distanced in medium shot to record the significance of the moment without milking it for sentiment, and Russell’s delivery of the line is in absolute alignment with the scene’s emotional timbre. There is not an ounce of self-pity, just a good-natured and familiar recognition of the embarrassment of others at his disability. The character is instantly established, and a performance is born. This early slight to Homer is not the only cloud on the horizon during what should be a joyous occasion for the ex-servicemen. In the opening scene, Fred Derry has been unable to get a seat on an American Airlines flight, though a businessman alongside him has no such difficulty with his reservation; there is even enough room on the plane for the man’s excess baggage and his golf clubs, it seems, but not enough for a returning war hero. It is an early premonition of the way Fred is to be elbowed aside by the society he has rejoined (and indeed, has risked his life to protect). There is another hint of that when he, Homer, and Al are sitting in the nose of the plane bringing them home, enjoying an aerial view of their hometown. They fly over an airfield that is now full of planes about to be junked because they are no longer needed. “From the factory to the scrapheap,” comments Fred, “that’s all they’re good for now.” Without realizing it, Fred is glimpsing his own future. Much later in the film, he will revisit that airfield, and we will be at liberty to contrast his early hope to his later despair. Even Homer, when glimpsing the local sports stadium, recalls how many passes he made on that field. The irony of that memory is visible on the faces of Al and Fred, even if it does not occur immediately to Homer. Again, it is not until much later in the film, at a low point in his life, that Homer will look at the photographs in his bedroom of his sporting activities and be forcibly reminded of earlier times. The superbly filmed aerial view becomes more than a glimpse of the men’s homes; it becomes a landscape of their minds.

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The mood of excitement mixed with trepidation is continued when they are driven to their respective homes. As they look out of the cab window, traveling shots reveal key landmarks of their hometown, including a shot of Butch’s Place, a local bar owned by Homer’s uncle (Hoagy Carmichael), which will subsequently become an unofficial focal point of the three men’s developing relationship. There is little dialogue, but the ebullience of the filming, accompanied by Hugo Friedhofer’s alert and jovial score, conveys a sparkling yet also poignant sense that this is what the men have dreamed about and longed for during their absence. At the same time, there is an undertone of disquiet that gives the scene its suspense. The setting is familiar yet new. Even Butch’s Place, Homer notices, has a new neon sign. The traveling shots might be exhilarating, but one also notes the obliviousness of the townspeople to the servicemen’s return, and the fact that the men are traveling parallel to the sights and to the people rather than among them. There is not yet a sense of belonging. That process will only begin when each of them gets out of the cab and takes a tense and tentative step toward acceptance and assimilation. Homer is the first to arrive home. Billy Wilder (who says in the Catherine Wyler documentary, “I’m no pushover, believe me, I laugh at Hamlet”) always expressed amazement that he was moved to tears at this point in the film, particularly as the shot of Homer’s arrival on the family lawn is taken from the viewpoint of Al and Fred inside the cab: i.e., the camerawork is not insisting on or trying to underline the sentiment. The following shot is from inside the doorway of the house as Homer is spotted by his little sister Luella, who calls her mom and dad before leaping over the fence to tell Wilma, and then rushing to embrace Homer herself. The scene is moving, it seems to me, precisely because of this camera reticence and the way Homer initially seems to be in limbo, with his arms stiffly by his side. Only gradually does the emotion swell. Also, the scene has been supremely well prepared through the sympathy established for Homer at the outset and our shared anxiety about his reception; and also through the bond that has quickly formed between the three men, particularly between Fred and Homer. Dana Andrews is very good here, showing how carefully Fred listens to what Homer is saying. One notices that it is Fred who tells the driver to wait, until they are reassured by the warmth of Homer’s welcome. It is one of the bleaker ironies of the film that it will be Fred’s concern for Homer that will later lead him to lose his job (though this is not the only factor). Friedhofer’s score also assists, with initially jaunty themes and snappy rhythms that give way to music of a slower tempo. As Homer nears his home, a tender new string theme is introduced. Wyler allows the full joy of the reunion to flow very naturally, reserving the full impact until the end, when the cab pulls away and (unseen by Al and Fred) Homer gives an involuntary wave and his family sees the hooks for the first time. Homer’s expression changes, because, without even having to look around, he can sense the reaction behind him and the changed atmosphere. It is then Al’s turn, and he, too, is tense, feeling almost as if he is about to go once again into combat. Fred is taken aback by the location and the luxury apartments, an important point as the social and class difference between the two men becomes an issue when Fred falls for Al’s daughter. “What are you, a retired bootlegger, or something?” Fred jokes, to which Al replies, laconically, “Nothing as dignified as that, I’m a banker.” (In retrospect, it is one of the lines in the film that might not have gone down well with American conservatives.) On entering the building, Al has to contend with a rather officious receptionist (as with Fred and Homer, the welcome home is not entirely unqualified). Fredric March’s face is a picture of tense concentration as he takes the elevator to the fourth floor; one can almost sense the dryness in his throat. As he hesitantly approaches the door of his apartment,

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Friedhofer’s music softly introduces a wistful variation on the popular song, “Among My Souvenirs,” which (as we learn later) is a favorite of his and his wife. It is as if the refrain is playing softly in his mind as he rings the bell. What follows is what David Lean thought of as one of the best emotional scenes in movies (and has given this book its title). When his son opens the door and is about to react in delight, Al quickly puts his hand over the boy’s mouth to stifle the sound, so as not to spoil the surprise of his return (it is a detail in Kantor’s treatment). He then does the same with his daughter, who has emerged from an adjoining room, and is similarly about to cry out. “Where’s your mother?” he asks quietly, before looking down the hallway. His wife, Milly, has heard the bell and has called out to ask who is at the door. She is about to repeat the question when suddenly we see her back momentarily stiffen, as if the silence has given her the answer. From Al’s point of view, we see her emerge at the end of the hallway, and then the children move discreetly out of the shot on either side of the frame as Al moves toward Milly, the very length of the hallway seeming to mirror the length of their separation. Then, in medium shot, they embrace. The hesitancy, awkwardness, and visual restraint all combine to give the scene a feeling of truth and universality to the kind of situation that must have been played out in different ways in millions of homes at that time. “It makes me choke even now,” said Lean, when recalling the scene at the American Film Institute in 1984. “He’s a master at it. I think it’s because he has a wonderful heart” (Stevens Jr.: 436). By contrast, Fred’s return to his home on the wrong side of the tracks is a distinct anticlimax. His smart uniformed presence stands out incongruously in the rather shabby context, which will be a feature of Fred’s appearance in his new social environment: visually, he does not fit. He is greeted in a friendly enough fashion by his stepmother, Hortense (the ever reliable Gladys George, giving a more sympathetic portrayal of the character than is suggested in the treatment) and by his gentle father (Roman Bohnen), who seems a little the worse for wear through drink. Unknown to Fred, his wife, Marie, has moved out and is living in an apartment in town and working in a nightclub. Curtailing his visit home in a vain attempt to find her (their reunion will not take place until the following day), Fred winds up at Butch’s Place to drown his sorrows. He will eventually be joined by Homer, who has also felt compelled to come out because of the awkward atmosphere at home. The pair are soon joined by Al (accompanied by wife and daughter), who has similarly found his first night at home a strangely unsettling experience and has insisted on going out on a drunken binge. His son, Rob, has been left at home and, unusually, will more or less fade out of the picture, though not before he has showed a somewhat muted enthusiasm for his father’s returning gifts — a cap from a dead Japanese soldier, a samurai sword — in the wake of what he has been learning in school about Hiroshima. There is a post-atom-bomb as well as postwar pall in the film’s atmosphere. Even by the end of the film the intimations of possible future estrangement between father and son have not been eradicated. In his generally enthusiastic two-part critique of the film in The Nation (December 7 and 14, 1946), James Agee queried what he called “the invention of a nice bar in which the veterans keep meeting each other,” which he thought dramatically contrived and fundamentally untruthful, because he thought “most men of such disparate classes or worlds would meet seldom, with greater embarrassment than friendliness” (Agee: 230). To be precise, we will see Al in that bar only once more in the film — there is no suggestion that it will become his regular watering hole — and his presence there is for a decidedly unfriendly meeting with Fred to quiz him about his relationship with Peggy. As for Fred and Homer, one feels that the bar will become more than just a drinking place but a temporary oasis

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from the desert of difficulty and drabness that surrounds them at home (and we know that Homer’s parents disapprove of Butch). At this stage, however, the reunion between the three is played mainly for comedy. Both Al and Fred are already substantially drunk when they meet up again. In Al’s case, it manifests itself in a general raucousness and a desire to dance, even with the waiter, when he misreads the waiter’s signal to the group for another round of drinks as an invitation to take a turn on the dance floor (Billy Wilder loved that moment). In Fred’s case, it manifests itself in a general sleepiness when he cuddles up to Peggy in the booth and then collapses in front of Marie’s apartment block and has to be taken back to Al’s place. Al momentarily forgets where he is and fails to recognize his wife, then goes into a romantic routine which, one suspects, he enacted several times when overseas. When he awakes in a strange bed, Fred’s first reaction is to admire the lace drapery, but his second and more decisive one is to check that his money is still in his pocket. Over the years there has been the suggestion that The Best Years of Our Lives is a sentimental film. That single gesture of Fred is one of numerous such moments that indicates that the film is anything but. During the night Fred has had a nightmare about a bombing mission in which one of his closest friends has been killed. We will learn later that it is a recurrent dream and will be recalled forcefully in the airfield scene toward the end of the film. On this first occasion he will be restrained and comforted by Peggy before he sobs himself to sleep. The scene is a dawning suggestion of a potential developing relationship between them, but more significant, perhaps, is Wyler’s decision not to use a flashback. The trauma of the memory is conveyed by the intensity of the acting, writing, and Friedhofer’s evocatively discordant music. The incident is clearly and compellingly still active in Fred’s present. Wyler’s refusal of the flashback is an unobtrusive way of implying what is a significant thematic motif: namely, that, for these men, the past is irretrievable. This is suggested occasionally in humorous detail, such as their ill-fitting civilian clothes. Fred’s suit is truly hideous — a nice touch of costuming there — and for once, one feels that Marie is right to complain and to prefer him in uniform. But when she says, “You look like yourself ” when he puts on his uniform, the close-up of Fred conveys a sudden fear: that this is no longer himself and that the man she fell in love with no longer exists. Their love is symbolized by a photo of them in Marie’s apartment, taken, one assumes, around about the time of their wedding, with Fred in uniform about to embark for war. Photographs are very important in the film. When Al gets up the morning after and studies his reflection in the mirror, the glowering visage he confronts is nicely modified by a framed photo of his more handsome, younger self on the shelf below the mirror. It is a nice movie moment, because the contrast is observed by audiences as an indication not only of how much the character has changed and aged over the years but also how much the actor, Fredric March, has done so also. One can imagine that some actors might have bridled at this blow to their vanity, but there is no evidence of that in March’s performance. He would recognize this as a moment that highlights the key theme of change, the difference between the old world and the new. In his own case, if what we are seeing is no longer the glamorous leading man of old, what we are observing instead is someone whose features have been altered by time into those of a mature character actor of commanding stature. Over breakfast with his wife, Al reflects on this change. “Last year it was kill Japs,” he says, “this year it’s make money.” I have italicized the last phrase to draw attention to the way March delivers it, giving it a striking sarcastic rasp and accompanying the statement with the gesture of rubbing his fingers together in ironic, mercenary anticipation. Ostensibly,

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his return to work could not seem more smooth, for he is greeted almost like a returning son by his boss, Mr. Milton (Ray Collins, at his most smugly avuncular), and promoted to a vice presidency, with the responsibility of administering small loans for ex–GIs. However, he will run into trouble when he approves a loan for an ex-serviceman who seems of good character but who has no collateral. After some argument, the loan is cleared, but with the distinct impression that this kind of thing must not happen again, and certainly not without prior consultation with other senior management. At an official function later that evening, Al gives a drunken speech that narrowly averts disaster when he uses the word “collateral” in a military anecdote in a manner that is at best humorously irreverent and at worst openly sarcastic. His concluding platitude — that he is proud to be part of an organization that is “alive, generous and human”— just about saves the day, but the public embrace he is given at the end by Milly (who has been keeping count of his drinks by marking them on the tablecloth with a fork) is, one feels, not simply a wife’s pride at the noble sentiment but relief that he has stopped before doing too much damage. Calling the speech “reasonably bold,” James Agee continued, “Yet one is emotionally left with the impression that he has cleverly and lovably won his fight and will win it on every subsequent occasion” (Agee: 230). I have to say that I am left with exactly the opposite impression: that he might have won his fight in the first instance but that this is a concession that will not be granted so easily again. I base this on the evident disapproval of some of the bank officials at Al’s speech; the rueful way the camera lingers on Mr. Milton after he has acquiesced to Al’s action, conciliatory on this occasion but clearly troubled by the financial implications of such behavior; and by Al’s growing alcohol consumption in the film, which seems to be linked with his increasing dissatisfaction with his job. In Kantor’s treatment, Al leaves the bank and goes into partnership with the man whose loan he approved, but Wyler and Sherwood thought that was too easy a solution (ironic, then, that the film should be criticized for sentimentalizing the novel). Wanting an ending that was not simply suitable for the character but had a more universal application to the situation of returning veterans, Wyler wrote that “it wasn’t a fair solution to let Al Stephenson quit his job at the bank and go into something else where he could avoid “problems,” because millions of other veterans would have no such easy alternative to a job they did not like. Most men would have to stick with the job and try to change it for the better” (Koszarski: 110–11). Al will stay at the bank and advocate a more liberal loan policy for veterans, but it is left open at the end how well he will succeed. Whereas Al’s return to his former employment at the bank has, initially at least, been a comfortable resumption of his former routine, Fred’s return to the drugstore where he worked as a soda jerk is a shock to the system. In his absence, the drugstore has been taken over by a corporation called Midway Drugs; and the first shot of Fred’s entrance into this new world is one of the most visually striking in the entire film. Stalls and counters stretch as far as the eye can see and Fred himself is almost lost amidst the numerous price-signs that are advertising each product. Al’s prediction of the new spirit abroad in the country — “This year it’s make money”— receives its most emphatic visual confirmation here. Perhaps because we are registering it from Fred’s point of view, there is something chilling about this flat, utilitarian declaration of commercial enterprise; one is reminded of the soulless supermarket of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), where the murder-for-profit schemers (Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck) discuss their dark deeds amidst cans of baby food and signs proclaiming “More For Less.” Fred’s arrival has been noticed by two employees, who are clearly less than pleased to

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see him, but for different reasons. One of them, Mr. Merkel, was a former schoolchum whom Al used to tease with the nickname “Sticky,” but he is now the store’s floor manager, who will later make it abundantly clear that such nicknames will be completely inadmissible when Fred becomes his subordinate. At this stage, Merkel comments pointedly to his female assistant, that “nobody’s job is safe with these servicemen crowding in” [my italics]. The remark not only suggests the unpopularity of ex-servicemen among some civilians (somewhat less than the hero’s welcome which they might have expected and to which they might feel entitled) but also alludes to a future social problem, where women who had acquired work skills during the war will have to step aside in the workforce after the war in order that the returning servicemen be accommodated. (This subject was to be covered magnificently in Connie Field’s 1980 documentary, The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter.) One of the noticeable features of the film is its subtle recognition of a postwar shift in gender relationships. In all three of the main romantic relationships (Al and Milly, Homer and Wilma, Fred and Peggy), one could argue that the woman is the stronger character of the two, and that part of that strength is to recognize that an element of feminine sacrifice — or at least adaptation — will be involved if the relationship is to survive. As it happens, at this stage Fred is not looking to return to his old job. Indeed, he has told Peggy that this is one thing that is out of the question if he is to start a new life. Somewhat reluctantly, he is prevailed upon by his old boss to speak to the new owner, Mr. Bullard (Erskine Sanford, projecting a kind of restrained disdain that anticipates his most famous role as the hotel clerk in High Noon), but it soon becomes apparent to them both that they have little to offer each other, even financially, for the job as floor manager’s assistant pays less than a third of what Fred was paid as a bombardier. The large window in Bullard’s office, which permits him to see across the entire shop-floor, seems almost to parody Fred’s aerial view of Boone City prior to landing, which then appeared to symbolize boundless opportunity. But the feature here is fleetingly reminiscent of the kind of supervisor surveillance that Chaplin satirized in Modern Times (1936). As Fred is leaving, he notices that his uniform still has the capacity to turn a few heads, and he smiles with a sort of quizzical amusement at the long soda-fountain counter to which he has vowed never to return. It is a moment of dramatic irony, when his money has run out and it has become apparent to him that his skills as a bomber pilot are of little use to him or anyone else in a postwar environment, he will have to, in his words, “get wise to himself ” and return to his former job, sheepishly, and with a keen feeling of defeat. Homer also struggles to readjust. Like Fred, he can recognize that the fault lies not really in the people or society around him, but in himself, notably in his hypersensitivity to other people’s pity and his suspicion that Wilma’s continuing devotion might come more from her essential kindheartedness than from love. At one stage, when conversing with Wilma in his shed, he notices his sister Luella and her friends staring in at the window, and he loses control, shouting, “You wanna see the freak?” and pushing his hooks through the windowpane. The gesture recalls that scene in Wuthering Heights, when Heathcliff, still smarting from Cathy’s class-infected repugnance at his “dirty hands,” thrusts them through the windowpane of the stable, as if wanting to sever them at the wrists in a morbid act of self-laceration. It also anticipates a moment in The Children’s Hour, when one of the accused teachers, Martha (Shirley MacLaine), reacting to the insolently curious gaze of the delivery boy, shrieks at him, “I’m a freak!” In Best Years, the children mean no harm, and Homer will apologize for his overreaction, but it is typical of Wyler to force us suddenly to confront examples of individual or social intolerance and make us feel for its victims — the maimed,

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the injured, and the different. In his funeral eulogy on Wyler ( July 1, 1981), his lifelong friend, Philip Dunne, linked that with what he saw as an aspect of Wyler’s “moral courage — he never wavered in his championship of the underdog.” I mentioned earlier James Agree’s criticism of what he saw as the dramatic contrivance and psychological improbability of the “friendly bar”— i.e., Butch’s Place, where the veterans meet. In fact, after their first evening together, there will be only one other scene where the three will assemble at Butch’s, and they will not be all together, and the scene will be far from friendly. It is perhaps the most celebrated scene in the film. At the beginning, we see Al from behind, in the foreground of the shot, seated in one of the booths with his right arm stretched across the back of the seat, and looking toward the door as he awaits Fred. Fred enters in deep-focus long-shot and comes forward to sit down opposite Al, clearly in anticipation of a sociable reunion. Instead, Al has come to warn him to stay away from his daughter. It is a fine scene, superbly acted by both men, particularly by March, conveying a menacing intimidation that seems to lurk behind an icy control (one certainly believes him when he says he learned how to fight dirty during the war and is not beyond using similar tactics here). It is also a painful meeting, partly because there is no doubt the men have a basic fondness for each other, but also, because in his present mood of defeatism, Fred is inclined to share Al’s view of his unworthiness for someone of Peggy’s caliber and character. When Al talks of his determination to “help her forget about you and get her married to some decent guy who will make her happy,” the words seem to strike home almost with the force of a blow. Up to this point, Dana Andrews has eloquently suggested Fred’s anger mainly through a tightening of the facial muscles and a hunching up of the shoulders, but on these words, he looks down with an expression of abject despair, as if looking inside himself and not liking what he sees. Fatalistically, he agrees to end the relationship, salvaging what little is left of his pride by paying for the drinks. As he is leaving, on an impulse he turns into the phone booth at the far corner of the bar to make the phone call to Peggy. At this moment, Homer enters the bar and insists that Al joins him and Butch around the piano so that he can demonstrate his new piano playing prowess with his hooks, that he has mastered in a duet routine with Butch. As Al leans on the piano and admires the performance, he also is keenly aware of what is happening behind him and anxious about the possible outcome of Fred’s call. The scene has become famous partly because of the analysis of it in his 1948 essay on Wyler by André Bazin, whose praise for its mise-en-scène is probably the single most influential (albeit controversial) piece of criticism ever written on Wyler’s work. In discussing what he termed the film’s “ethic of realism,” Bazin drew certain theoretical deductions about the relationship of deep-focus photography to a film’s realism that have since been widely challenged. For example, Christopher Williams has suggested that “Bazin’s contention that ‘composition in depth means that the spectator’s relationship with the image is nearer to that which he has with reality’ is easily disprovable, in that human visual perception is capable of adjustment according to different situations” (Williams: 52). However, Bazin did acknowledge that “there is not one but several realisms” and that, in the cinema, there can only be what he called a “representation of reality” rather than the thing itself (ibid: 41). More contentious was his statement, “The frequency of long shots and the perfect sharpness of the focal depths contribute enormously to reassuring the spectator and leaving him the means of observing and making choices, and even, thanks to the length of the shots, the time to form an opinion.... Depth of field in Wyler aims at being liberal and democratic like the consciences both of the American viewers and of the characters in The Best Years of Our

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Lives” (Cardullo: 9). Karel Reisz, among others, was quick to query whether the deployment of deep-focus photography was any more “democratic” than montage, since audiences were still in thrall to what the director chose to show and selected for them to see. If Bazin’s deductions about the implications of Wyler’s style were open to question, he was nevertheless responding, in an acutely sensitive manner, to Wyler’s preference for a certain kind of mise-en-scène, and attempting to tease out what this preference might portend. Some years later, Wyler himself was to reflect on this in a fascinating correspondence he shared with the fine Japanese director, Kimisaburo Yoshimura (a number of Japan’s very greatest directors — Ozu, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi — held Wyler’s films in high regard). Responding to Yoshimura’s query about his so-called “length-wise composition” in a personal letter (May 10, 1955), Wyler wrote: What you have termed my “length-wise composition” is just my attempt to include as much action and reaction in one camera angle, thus avoiding cutting to reverse angles, which I feel inhibit an audience’s complete concentration and identification with the emotions of a scene.... The so-called “length-wise composition” is my attempt to stage a scene in such a way that the camera can be the quietest possible observer of a scene while at the same time including as many of the various factors of a scene which I wish to have communicated to the audience.

That is probably as close as Wyler ever came to defining his style; his description of the camera in his films as “the quietest possible observer” is a profoundly suggestive formulation (quite distinct, say, from Hitchcock’s idea of the camera as storyteller or Ford’s of the camera as information booth). The value of Bazin’s recognition of Wyler’s stylistic traits is not in his theoretical conclusions but in his aesthetic appreciation, and the profoundly satisfying way he uncovers the dramatic rightness of Wyler’s visual strategy and of what he called “those sumptuously eloquent images which leave behind an indelible impression of formal beauty inviting retrospective contemplation” (cited in Williams: 37). Bazin’s analysis of the formal beauty of the scene at Butch’s Place is one of his most memorable pieces of criticism. Part of the fascination of the scene resides in the different levels of interest in a single frame. As Bazin demonstrated, at one particular dramatic point there are two distinct levels of visual interest: Homer and Butch perform their piano duet in the foreground of the frame; and Fred makes the phone call to Peggy in a small rectangle on the left of the screen in the background of the shot. The two events are linked by the presence of Al, who, while listening to the duet, is primarily wondering about the phone call. It is a clever decision to put the main drama of the scene in the background, which means that we cannot hear what Fred says or see clearly how he looks, but only get a sense of his emotion from his slow replacement of the receiver on the hook and his extended pause as if deep in thought before leaving the booth. As spectators, we are forced to imagine what happened and, in that way, are perhaps drawn in a little closer to the drama. At the same time, by making the foreground of the frame (the duet) interesting and significant, Wyler adds an element of counterpoint and also increases the tension, for we find our attention divided between the two actions, as does Al. During the piano-playing of Homer and Butch, Wyler cuts in two close-ups of Al who, while trying to listen appreciatively to the performance, also looks quickly over his shoulder to get a hint of what is happening following the phone call. Clearly, Wyler and his excellent editor, Daniel Mandell, felt it was essential for the impact of the scene to cut in a reminder of its real point of interest without making it too overt (any more than Al wants Homer to suspect that his attention is really elsewhere). Even Bazin seemed to sense that these two shots rather contradicted his suggestion that the spectator is allowed more freedom with deep-focus photography to identify with whom he

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or she wishes, since Wyler is clearly guiding the spectator’s attention towards what he views as the scene’s main focus. “The two inserted shots,” Bazin suggests, “are equivalent to a sort of setting in bold type” (Williams: 37); but I prefer Axel Madsen’s adroit description of Al’s furtive backward glance as “an odd pivot of apprehension” (Madsen: 269). These inserts might upset the theory, but are essential for the clarity of the narrative. Whatever one might conclude generally about the theoretical and aesthetic implications of so-called deep-focus photography, there is no doubt that Toland’s camerawork contributes enormously to the scene’s subtlety and suggestiveness, enabling Wyler to secure the maximum visual clarity and dramatic intensity from the most economical of photographic means. An equally compelling scene follows shortly afterward, though engrossing for completely different reasons, not least because it has sometimes been criticized for simplistic exaggeration. Fred is to lose his job at the drugstore when he gets into a brawl with a customer (Ray Teal) after the latter has angered Homer by suggesting that America had been suckered into the war by “radicals in Washington” and that Homer’s wartime sacrifice was futile: the real enemies are the Communists. David Shipman thought it “hard to believe that the bombardier, reduced to his old job of soda-jerking, would be sacked for defending the amputee in an argument with a civilian blowhard” (Shipman: Volume 2: 681). To be strictly accurate, Fred resigns from his job before the manager has the chance to sack him; and his defense of Homer seems to me a little more complicated than the above description implies. The civilian is on the point of leaving the store and paying his check when Homer angrily accosts him; and when he tries to fend off Homer who has his hooks in the man’s lapels, he is physically attacked by Fred, who hits him so hard that he crashes into the perfume counter and lands face-down in an ungainly heap amidst a sea of broken glass. For all the customer’s overbearing and unpleasant manner, Fred’s assault on the older man seems extreme, even in supposed defense of his disabled friend. It would not only credibly get him sacked; one would imagine it could leave him liable to a charge of criminal assault. The ostensibly disproportionate violence of Fred’s action is notable particularly if one compares the equivalent scene in the treatment, where a waitress screams at Homer for his clumsiness in spilling a drink over her and Fred grabs her arm in anger in front of the other customers. A co-worker thinks this a sackable offense, though the boss seems more conciliatory, but Fred decides anyway that this is the cue to leave a job that he hates. One could say that the film changed this to make the scene more dramatic, but the alteration raises the dramatic stakes in more ways than one, for the argument in the film becomes political as well as personal. Fred is drawn into the argument not only because the customer says it all in his hearing (and adds that, as a mere soda jerk, Fred has no right to an opinion of his own), but also because the man’s strident insistence on the uselessness of Homer’s sacrifice has some applicability to Fred’s own situation. He’s a war hero, but is in a bad marriage, separated from the woman he loves, and in a dead-end job that he loathes and to which he swore he would never return. What kind of reward is that for risking his life for his country? Psychologically, Fred is hitting out not only in defense of his friend, but out of his own sense of frustration and disillusionment. The customer is on the receiving end of this because, inadvertently, he has struck a raw nerve. “Fascism is solved with a punch,” wrote Abraham Polonsky about this scene in his review of the film in the left-wing journal, Hollywood Quarterly (April 1947: 258). It was part of Polonsky’s intelligent, wide-ranging critique of what he saw as the dramatic compromises of Best Years that, in the end, meant that the film fell short of greatness. Some of Polonsky’s strictures will be considered in due course, but it seems fair to respond at the

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outset by saying that the punch solves nothing, let alone Fascism: indeed, Fred loses his job as a result of it. Also the implication that the film offers a simplistic resolution to the issues the scene raises seems to me itself simplistic and a distortion of its tone, which is anything but triumphalist and has instead a sense of prescient disquiet. After all, when Homer challenges the man about his views, the customer claims to be selling “plain, old-fashioned Americanism.” In a year’s time, as the Cold War intensified and its effects began to be felt in a nervous Hollywood, such views seem less like those of a loony extremist but perilously close to the political mainstream. That punch reflects not a solution to Fascism but an anxious reflex response in retaliation at the way things could be going. It is surely what Eric Rhode was thinking of when he talked of the film’s pervasive “mood of dismay” (Rhode: 422). As his biographers attest, there is no doubt also that this scene had a personal resonance for Wyler. In March 1944, while still in the service, he stayed at the Statler Hotel in Washington awaiting orders, and had been present when a bellman in charge of directing traffic had made an anti–Semitic remark about one of the departing guests. When Wyler drew his attention to this and the man made no effort to apologize, Wyler struck him with what Jan Herman described as “a short swift blow that seemed to explode from nowhere” (Herman: 266). As Wyler was in uniform and the action could in no way be construed as one of selfdefense, the offense was serious enough, in normal circumstances, to have warranted a courtmartial. In the event, Wyler received an official reprimand. Herman’s description of the blow is suggestive, because it implies a sudden impulse that had behind it everything that Wyler had been fighting and risking his life for. Fred’s blow in the drugstore has something of the same stamp: it is not about self-protection, and is only partly protection of a friend. It is more an instinctive defense of the meaning and value of everything Fred has been through during the war. It is worth dwelling on the connection between Wyler and the Fred Derry character because it reinforces something that Wyler claimed and doubters have challenged: that he really knew these characters. It was argued by Polonsky and others that Wyler understood the banker but was less at ease with the other two main characters, whereas I have always felt that there is something of Wyler in all three of them. It is true that Al Stephenson’s relatively affluent social situation is closest to Wyler’s own situation, though if his scenes ring especially true, this might have something to do also with March’s exceptional performance. Nevertheless, Wyler’s partial loss of hearing during his war experience undoubtedly sharpened his sensitivity to Homer’s disability; and his temporary fear that he might never be able to work again gave him an insight into Fred’s state of mind when he returns home and is unable to find a job that will deliver his hopes for the future. When making The Memphis Belle, Wyler must have encountered many Fred Derrys. Having lost his job and with his wife Marie insisting on a divorce, Fred has now resolved to leave Boone City. Packing his things, he picks up a photograph that was a memento of a night out when he and Marie had been invited to accompany Peggy and her escort on a double-date at a night-club. He tears the photo in half, keeping the part that just shows him with Peggy (a sentimental touch), but he then tears that in half also, evidence of his feelings of hopelessness and of the film’s “tough sentimentality” that Cameron Crowe admired so much (Crowe: 280). Saying goodbye to his father and stepmother, he goes to the airport to hitch a ride on an army plane. While waiting for the plane’s departure, he wanders into the airplane graveyard over which he has flown at the beginning of the movie, when he was returning to the “good old USA” with so much hope. The contrast in mood could hardly be more stark, but worse even than that is the parallel, as Fred sees it, with

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his own situation: a skilled aviator for which, like these airplanes, the country has no further use and who, like them, has effectively been consigned to the scrap heap. Wyler and Sherwood agreed on what was now needed here: something that would convey both conflict and change in Fred, compelling him to remember the kind of courage he had displayed in wartime and to think of how to apply it to his postwar situation. In his article for The Screen Writer, Wyler recalled that Sherwood had told him, “You’ll have to do something cinematic here. I know just what we want to say, but it isn’t to be said in words — it must be said with the camera, and that’s your business” (Koszarski: 110). Wyler’s solution was to come up one of the most powerful and effective cinematic moments of the whole film — indeed, of his whole career. However, in order that the audience understand what might be going through Fred’s mind when he climbs into the abandoned B-17 (which is appropriately called Round Trip?, as if echoing Fred’s own uncertainty about his ultimate destination), Wyler cleverly prefaces the scene with one between Fred’s stepmother and his father, who has discovered the citation for his Distinguished Flying Cross (another souvenir, like Peggy’s photograph, that Fred has cast aside as now useless) and begins reading it aloud to his wife. As he speaks of “the heroism, devotion to duty, professional skill and coolness under fire displayed by Captain Derry,” the words are quietly accompanied by a complete musical statement of Hugo Friedhofer’s noble main theme, as if making a restrained plea on behalf of a basically decent man who now seems completely lost. Roman Bohnen’s performance of the father here is very sensitive, particularly the way he conveys the sadness behind the pride and reads the citation almost as if it were a letter of condolence for a son lost in battle. But the poignancy also comes from the way the citation is at once a rebuke to a society that can find no place for the returning veteran and a reminder of how far Fred has fallen in his own self-esteem. It also a reminder of his recurrent nightmare, which is now to return, but in daylight. Wyler’s own words in his Screen Writer article offer the best description of the subsequent scene: We did nothing in the interior of the B-17 except show Fred Derry seated and staring out the dusty plexi-glass. Then we went to a long exterior shot of the plane, in which we could see the engine nacelles, stripped of engines and propellers. We panned from nacelle to nacelle, as though there really were engines in them and the engines were starting for take-off.... We started moving our dolly in toward the nose of the B-17, through which we could see Fred Derry seated at the bombardier’s post. This shot moved in from a low angle, and ... created the illusion of the plane coming toward the camera, as if for a take-off. To these shots we planned to add sound effects of engines starting and let the music score suggest flight. We then cut inside to a shot of Fred’s back, and as we moved in, we saw his hand reach for the bomb release.... [Kozarski: 111].

Apparently, Dana Andrews was astounded when he saw this scene for the first time at a preview. While being filmed, he thought Wyler was just indulging his nostalgia for the Air Force and that the footage would end on the cutting-room floor, only to find it one of the film’s most impressive scenes, because of the strength of the imagery and what Andrews called “the remnants of the best years of his life — a graveyard of planes” (Easton: 238). It is an expertly crafted, wordless fusion of direction, cinematography, sound design, and music that conveys the conflict and confusion in the man’s mind without recourse to flashback. Friedhofer’s score at this point (he thought this was the best musical sequence he ever wrote for the movies) returns to the music of the earlier nightmare, with battering dissonances that sound like machine-gun fire, descending chords that evoke the frightening sen-

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sation of someone free-falling into an abyss, and an accelerating tempo that suggests the agitated heartbeat of a man in a state of terror. “The tonal din becomes a heightened symbol of the mental dread from which its victim has each time to be re-awakened,” wrote Frederick W. Sternfeld (Music Quarterly, Volume 33, 1947) in what was the first study of a film score to be published in an academic music journal. (In talking of the formal subtleties of the score, Sternfeld even drew comparisons with Beethoven.) As indicated in Wyler’s description, the camerawork and soundtrack combine to give the illusion of the plane about to take off on another mission. The roar of the engines not only summons the world of The Memphis Belle and the heroism it recorded, but seems to bring the plane back to life, just as Fred himself, in bringing his nightmare out into the cold light of day and reliving the combat experience that earned him that citation, is exorcising the ghosts that have tormented him. He rediscovers his sense of self-worth. The recollection of the courage he had shown during the war could yet serve him in peacetime. In his 1975 interview at the American Film Institute, Wyler said: “If I made the picture today, I would end it right there. I think it would be a better ending” (Stevens Jr.: 211). If he had, there is no doubt in my mind that the film would have been much less successful than it was. Wyler might have been influenced in that view by subsequent criticism of the outcome of this scene and of the film’s conclusion. For example, Karel Reisz was full of praise for Wyler’s handling of Fred’s hallucination in the plane, which he thought a brilliant visualization of a complex state of mind, but he thought the scene’s ending was “unpardonably crude. Fred gets out of the plane, sees a disposal man, asks him for a job, gets it and, in Polonsky’s words, “we are all enormously relieved to find that the intense emotional experience of the last few minutes has meant just nothing at all” (Reisz: 28). Reisz’s description of the scene is an oversimplification. The disposal man, who is a former member of the task forces, is initially unsympathetic and even antagonistic to someone whom he refers to derisively as “one of the fallen angels of the air force”; it is only when Fred persists and the man recognizes his desperation and determination that he relents and passes Fred in to one of his assistants. Polonsky’s comment seems to me to entirely to miss the point. The scene would only mean “just nothing at all” without the outcome of a new start for Fred, because the whole purpose of the scene is to show that Fred has come through a personal block toward a new self-realization. It would not do to exaggerate or romanticize what he is being offered either: a job as an unskilled laborer working his way from the bottom in a junkyard is not exactly a generous or fitting reward for a returning war hero. Nevertheless, it does represent a step forward, and the symbolism has a part to play. The raw material from the scrapped planes will be used to build new prefabricated homes. Former instruments of destruction are to be transformed into materials for construction, a process that might afford Fred the opportunity to start building a new life for himself. Homer and Wilma are to be married. Walking home together after the fracas at the drugstore, Fred advises Homer to lose no time in proposing to Wilma, but, typical of this film, it is actually Wilma who takes the initiative. She tries to convince Homer — and the implication is that she is doing so against her parents’ wishes — that her feelings for him are those of love and not pity. The scene when Homer asks Wilma to accompany him to his bedroom so he can show her what would be involved in caring for him must have caused the Production Code some headaches, but the scene is handled with such discretion that any misgivings were silenced. At the stage when he says, “But I can’t —” and Wilma says, “I’ll do that, Homer,” buttoning his pajamas for him, Friedhofer’s music modulates to a major statement of Wilma’s theme. It is a moment of sudden emotional uplift, indicating

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that a barrier has been crossed. At the end of the scene Wilma leaves the room and closes the door, only for the door then to be re-opened slightly. She has remembered that Homer will need that if he wishes to leave the room during the night. The process of caring has begun. Is Wilma, as played by Cathy O’Donnell, too good to be true? Two factors might have played a part in influencing the affection with which the character and the performance are presented: the fact that Harold Russell had actually married his childhood sweetheart, Rita, in 1944; and that Cathy O’Donnell was to marry Wyler’s brother, Robert, in 1948, after having met him during the making of this film. Just occasionally life has the right to be as sentimental as the movies. During the wedding scene there is a deep-focus shot that André Bazin admired as much as the celebrated shot in Butch’s bar. On the right-hand side of the frame, Homer and Wilma exchange their wedding vows, watched by Al and Milly among the guests in the background; while on the left-hand side of the frame in the foreground is Fred, standing behind Homer as his best man. In the background, there is Peggy, standing alongside her parents. Again, there is a duality of dramatic interest, this time less between foreground and background of the frame as between right and left. Although the dramatic interest ostensibly focuses on the married couple, we are equally aware of the physical alignment of Fred and Peggy, surely at this moment thinking as much about each other as about the happy pair. By keeping the camera still and everything in focus, Wyler allows an audience to feel the dramatic currents cutting across the shot which, for Bazin, is more satisfying, suggestive, and involving than pointing up these connections more overtly by montage. For me, the beauty of the shot goes even further than this. By making the three couples simultaneously visible and in focus in the frame, Wyler is inviting an audience to reflect that the words of the marriage service have an applicability to all of them and not simply to the newly married couple. Fred might be daydreaming of subsequent wedded bliss with Peggy — or agonizing over its impossibility — but he must surely also be thinking that he has been through all this before; and indeed, one of his arguments with Marie has been about these very words, he reminding her that she took him “for better, for worse,” she asking him pointedly in reply when “the better” is going to happen. Similarly, if Peggy is having romantic thoughts during these words, she might also be reflecting on the insight she has involuntarily gained into her own parents’ marriage when she argues with her father about her relationship with Fred. Apologizing to her father for suggesting that he is too old to remember what it feels like to be in love, she nevertheless insists that they cannot understand her feelings because “it’s just that everything’s been so perfect for you ... you’ve never had any trouble of any kind....” At that, Al and Milly give each other a rueful look (superbly acted by March and Loy) and Milly quietly says, “How many times have I said I hated you and meant it in my heart? How many times have you said you were sick of me and that we were all washed up? How many times have we had to fall in love all over again?” The questions are left unanswered; marriage can be a battlefield, too. Overcome by the confusion of her own feelings and unwittingly exposing unsuspected fissures in what she thought was the perfect marriage of her parents, Peggy bursts into tears. Milly comes over to comfort her, with a gesture that ushers the less-sensitive Al out of the room. It is my favorite scene in the movie. James Agee wrote wisely of the beauty of Teresa Wright’s performance in the film, and of the way she used what he called her “translucent face with delicate and exciting talent, and with something of a novelist’s perceptiveness behind the talent” (Agee: 233). Her acting in this scene exemplifies all of that, just as Wyler’s direction

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demonstrates that, in scenes of domestic and family conflict, nobody could touch him for mature observation and wry wisdom. At the end of the wedding ceremony, as the remainder of the guests move forward to congratulate the happy couple, Fred moves over to Peggy and kisses. her. He then proposes, with what is surely one of the most oblique (even bleak) proposals of marriage in a Hollywood movie. “You know what it will be, don’t you, Peggy?” he says. “It may take us years to get anywhere. We’ll have no money, no decent place to live — we’ll have to work, get kicked around....” The radiant close-up of Peggy suggests that she is not really listening, and, very unusually for Wyler, the film closes on a romantic kiss, and Peggy’s hat falls off (perhaps a fleeting, good-humored self-reference to the ending of The Gay Deception). This ending has frequently been dismissed as facile and sentimental, but I still sense a duality in that final embrace; I am reminded of the observation that Richard Griffith and Arthur Mayer made about the film when they wrote that it “epitomized both the dream and reality of the postwar world” (Griffith and Mayer: 381). That is what we have in that last shot: The dream is in Peggy’s face; the reality is in Fred’s words. It is a hopeful ending rather than a happy one. The three couples clearly have major problems ahead. The film’s precarious optimism might come out of Wyler’s basic humanity that has been tested and tempered by war, but he is under no illusions about the threats to civilization that lie ahead. The theme of “Whither America?” is explored through an acknowledgment of family dysfunction, generation conflict, uncertain masculinity, thwarted femininity, and a social situation of housing shortage, profiteering, the disillusionment of the returning veteran, and the harsh commercial realities of banks and businesses. On a broader scale, the film also evokes a world whose recent history now includes the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, and the possibility of global annihilation (which is alluded to three times in the film’s first thirty minutes), which in turn leads to a poisonous and possibly lethal atmosphere of Cold War paranoia. It is a film that knows the world could be better, but aims to touch the spectator with a sense of shared humanity. Its worldwise success suggested it reflected, however idealistically, a widespread longing. It was Wyler’s favorite of his films; the triumphant culmination of his collaboration with Goldwyn and Toland; and one of Hollywood’s happiest marriages of heart and technique.

FIVE The Paramount Films In his fine chapter on Wyler in Masters of the American Cinema, Louis Giannetti describes the five films the director made at Paramount as “among his best” (217). This is an unusual view, though I would certainly agree with him on three of the films. However, the more conventional view is that Wyler’s career took a qualitative dip after The Best Years of Our Lives, and that, to borrow a phrase from Peter Cowie’s Concise History of the Cinema, he was “unable to recapture ... the stylistic felicity of his earlier masterpieces” (36). Even André Bazin retreated a little from his earlier advocacy. The Paramount films warrant a closer look, as they constitute a varied and diverse body of work whose qualities have tended to be overlooked, like similar films of this period of directors such as Stevens, Huston, and Wilder, who fell out of critical fashion at the onset of auteurism. Even at the time, the Wyler films suffered mixed fortunes, both commercially and critically. They were a mixed bunch, comprising two adaptations of literary classics, The Heiress, derived from Henry James, and Carrie, adapted from Theodore Dreiser; two contemporary studies of violence in modern America, one situated in a police precinct (Detective Story) and the other in the heart of domestic suburbia (The Desperate Hours); and the other a fairy-tale romance nevertheless shot on location in Europe (Roman Holiday). Of these, Carrie— in artistic terms, arguably the finest of the five — was a financial flop. The Heiress and The Desperate Hours only gradually found an audience, but Detective Story, made on a limited budget, was a solid success; and Roman Holiday, which must have seemed the least characteristic of the five at time of shooting, was a smash hit and one of the films (because of the Audrey Hepburn connection) for which Wyler is now best known. There is an undoubted irony in this, because in a letter to Wyler ( July 16, 1952), the Paramount executive in charge of production, Don Hartman, wrote, “Once during our little walks in the country, you said this would not be the picture that would enhance your reputation or that you would be remembered by. You may be most pleasantly surprised!” In terms of what one might call peer recognition, there was no perception during this period of a falling-off of standards, for the five films picked up 24 Oscar nominations between them and Wyler was nominated as best director for three of them (for The Heiress, Detective Story, and Roman Holiday). They again demonstrate his versatility and skill with a variety of material, but his distinctiveness of treatment can also be discerned. Three of them are based on stage plays and are essentially interior dramas, though in all of them, Wyler gives an illusion of movement through the fluency of his camerawork, which prevents the films from seeming static or simply a filmed record of a theatrical experience, but at the same time catching the sense of claustrophobia that is essential to the intensity of the material. All of them have what one might call the classical virtues of narrative clarity and unob120

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trusive style, and a surface realism and seriousness of purpose that exemplify what Giannetti calls a “tradition of quality” whereby a thoughtful and intelligent entertainment can nevertheless reach and touch a wide audience. None of the films, it might be noted — and this is quite a bold stroke — has a happy ending, even Roman Holiday. (This is in spite of the fact that, when that master scriptwriter of Italian neo-realism, Cesare Zavattini, was consulted on the script, he strongly recommended in a note to Wyler on January 23, 1952, that “a happy ending is necessary in an artificial story like this one.”) All of them seem to proclaim a belief that commercial and popular imperatives could be met without compromising a work’s artistic integrity. Molière’s requirement of a work of art was that it satisfied the professor as well as the cook. Wyler’s requirement, and that of other like-minded directors of his generation, was the same, though he would probably have put it the other way around. The films were made against the background of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigations into Communist infiltration of the film industry and the subsequent McCarthyist era of the early 1950s. None of the films explicitly engages with this era, yet no one with Wyler’s background could have remained untouched by it, and its influence is certainly felt tangentially, even down to the personnel whom Wyler was allowed to use. His desire to have Lillian Hellman write the screenplay of Carrie was thwarted by the blacklist; when Wyler wished to consult the writer Donald Ogden Stewart on the Roman Holiday script on learning he was in Rome, he was told that Stewart was persona non grata because of his left-wing political views and was not to be engaged under any circumstances. One of the Hollywood Ten, Dalton Trumbo, was not allowed to receive screen credit for his work on Roman Holiday; even Aaron Copland was a controversial selection as composer for The Heiress, though the fact that the composer of Fanfare for the Common Man and the finest symphonic statement of the spirit of America (his Symphony No. 3) could be considered a potential subversive illustrates the frightening absurdity of the times. In his superb memoir, Inside Out, Walter Bernstein cited another such example: “The Wizard of Oz was taken off the shelves of a Minnesota public library because it was deemed a socialist tract” (173). In his very entertaining account of his days in Hollywood, No Minor Chords, André Previn recalled an occasion when he was summoned for interview by an editor of the notorious anti–Communist magazine Red Channels to account for why he had given a benefit concert for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. Previn had to point out that not only was he in Berlin at the time of the alleged offense but also that he was only six years old (Previn: 63–4). However, such transparent idiocy on the part of the persecutors did not lessen their malevolent influence. Lester Koenig, who wrote the noble commentaries for The Memphis Belle and Thunderbolt, and was an important production associate on Best Years of Our Lives, The Heiress, Carrie and Roman Holiday, was blacklisted, and remained so despite Wyler’s efforts to reinstate him. He was eventually to form Contemporary, a new jazz record label. When Koenig died in 1977, Wyler delivered a funeral eulogy in which he reminded everyone of the Bronze Star Koenig had received for his contributions to The Memphis Belle and Thunderbolt and of the incalculable value of his contributions to other Wyler films. “For all of this,” Wyler remarked, “he was remembered by being blacklisted. Actually,” he added, “he was much more of a patriot than all of those self-appointed so-called patriots who made up the lists” (Herman: 357). Wyler’s anger at these treacherous times did not dissipate over the years. When the Los Angeles Times ran a piece on Republican senator and former Hollywood actor George Murphy in 1979, in which Murphy talked of the “myth of McCarthyism” and claimed that blacklisting had occurred in New York and not in Hollywood, Wyler

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was withering in his rebuttal. In a letter to the paper ( July 16, 1979), he wrote: “Ex-actor Murphy, who was living and working in Hollywood at the time, knows better than that. He reminds me of those Germans who still deny there was a Holocaust.” Wyler was active in his opposition to HUAC, believing that the committee itself was profoundly un–American. He was an undoubted target as a lifelong Democrat with a record of supporting liberal causes and who made no secret of his distaste for the methods and influence of HUAC and its supporters, within and outside the industry. His distinguished war record undoubtedly helped save him from persecution, as well as his estimable track record as a successful director of impeccable integrity. “They suspected me and put me on the list,” he told John Fowles, “but they talked like this: ‘That Wyler’s a Commie all right, but he’s so goddam soft and silly he doesn’t count’” (Journals, Volume One: 596). He added, “And I was working for Paramount then under contract. Paramount had pressure put on McCarthy.” It was a sly but no doubt accurate observation. The head of Paramount, Y. Frank Freeman (Billy Wilder always insisted that appellation should be treated as a question rather than a name) was a staunch anti–Communist who nevertheless recognized Wyler’s value to the studio and could reassure the committee, rather to Wyler’s chagrin, that he should be treated as a dupe or a fool — the phrase at the time was “premature anti–Fascist”— rather than as any sort of potential threat. The profit motive carried more power than any point of principle. Nevertheless, it is significant that Wyler’s attempts to make a film that reflected contemporary America at this time were nearly always blocked. Among the projects he suggested were two on the situation of black Americans in postwar America and the theme of racial prejudice. One of them, No Way Out, was to be made by Joseph L. Mankiewicz in 1950. The other, The Negro Soldier was never made at all, and Wyler had to wait until 1970 and The Liberation of L. B. Jones before this ambition was fulfilled. Another pet project of his at this time was to make a film about Franklin D. Roosevelt, scripted by Robert Sherwood and starring the British actor Godfrey Tearle, whom Wyler greatly admired. In a letter to the Paramount executive Henry Ginsberg ( January 5, 1949), Wyler stressed that “I don’t see a picture about him as a political picture but as a human story.” Ginsberg’s response (February 9, 1949) stated that “it is our feeling that the making of this film would be a dangerous undertaking and most certainly to make it at this time so soon after his death would make it even more so.” The word “dangerous” is very striking in that context. One feels that Ginsberg is not alluding to a commercial risk but a political one: it was not a propitious time in America, to say the least, to be making a film of a man who symbolized the spirit of liberal democracy.

The Heiress (1949) “Wyler’s mastery of the psychological nuances can have you drawing deep breaths. It’s a peerless, super-controlled movie” — Pauline Kael

When Martin Scorsese was preparing his 1993 screen adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, one of the films he studied was The Heiress, Wyler’s adaptation of Henry James’s classic novel Washington Square. It served as a yardstick for how nineteenthcentury period drama should be filmed. In the same year, Tom Cruise and director Mike Nichols briefly considered the possibility of a remake but abandoned the idea after revisiting

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Telling father of her engagement: Olivia de Havilland and Ralph Richardson in The Heiress (1949).

the film, disclosing to the Los Angeles Times (November 22) that the Wyler film was “perfect.” (Undeterred, Agnieszka Holland did a version of Washington Square in 1997.) The reputation of The Heiress has grown over the years. When the film appeared in 1949, the critics were guarded. The Heiress was thought to be more of a triumph of art direction than direction, the scrupulous attention to period detail overwhelming the drama, which was slow-moving and uninvolving. The film was also criticized for softening the situation and the characterization of the source material, missing the needle-sharp irony of the James text. Karel Reisz, thought that “there is a sense about The Heiress of discrepancy between the quality of material ( James) and the interpretive talents engaged in its translation (the Goetzes, Wyler), which suggests that its real deficiency is one of level” (Reisz: 30). There is a somewhat dated air about that criticism, typical of often patronizing attitudes to film adaptations of classic literature at the time (and since). The film’s interpretation of the source material — an interpretation that I think is bold, valid, and imaginative — will be considered in due course. In the event, compared with the commercial and critical triumphs of Wyler’s two previous features, Mrs. Miniver and The Best Years of Our Lives, The Heiress was only a modest box-office success. It was to win four of its eight Oscar nominations (for best actress, musical score, art direction, and costume design), losing out as best film to Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men and best director to Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives. It was Olivia de Havilland who had brought The Heiress to Wyler’s attention as a pos-

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sible project on which she hoped they could collaborate. She had seen it on the New York stage in the Jed Harris production, with Wendy Hiller as the heiress and Basil Rathbone as her father. Set in New York in the 1840s, The Heiress tells the story of a plain and shy heroine, Catherine Sloper, heiress to a large fortune, who is courted by a dashing but feckless suitor, Morris Townsend, to the chagrin of Catherine’s fearsome father, Dr. Sloper, who suspects that Townsend is only interested in his daughter’s money. De Havilland clearly thought the title role would be a great part for her. She was at a stage in her career when she was looking for more substantial dramatic challenges after her recent success in Anatole Litvak’s psychological drama, The Snake Pit (1948), which won her an Oscar nomination and a prize at the Venice Film Festival. In the role of Catherine Sloper — a quiet and unassuming heroine who eventually rebels against parental and patriarchal tyranny — she probably felt she was playing a character close to her own heart. Contrary to her predominant screen persona of decent docile femininity (exemplified to perfection by her performance as that paragon of goodness, Melanie Wilkes, in Gone with the Wind), Olivia de Havilland was a formidable personality who had rebelled against her roles at Warner Brothers to the extent of her being put on suspension, and had then successfully sued the company when they tried to add that period of suspension before releasing her from her seven-year contract. Catherine was to become like the actress who played her, which might have been part of the attraction; here is a character that discovers a personality of steel beneath a demure exterior. In de Havilland’s hands, the character is less stoic than in the novel, particularly in the scenes with Aunt Penniman (Miriam Hopkins), where there is a hint of deeper feelings and even a suggestion of wit. For example, Catherine undercuts her aunt’s patently insincere effusions about her late husband and then covers her face with a fan so that her startled aunt cannot read her expression. Her voice even changes timbre in the latter part of the film to denote her hardening of character and a new stiffening of defenses against people who seek to take advantage of her former trust. In the case of Ralph Richardson as Dr. Sloper, there were no doubts about his suitability for the role, though he was to triumph in it on the London stage, with Peggy Ashcroft as his co-star in a famous production directed by John Gielgud. The main discussion with Wyler, Richardson said, concerned the shape of the character’s beard and whether it should be circular or square. In the end, they agreed it could be a bit of both. Wyler had met Richardson a year before at the Oliviers’ and been immediately taken with his wit, eccentricity, and, not least, his dexterity on a motorbike. His greatness as an actor was beyond dispute. “You don’t direct an actor like Sir Ralph Richardson,” Wyler told Adrian Turner in his final public interview at the National Film Theatre in London. “The first scene I directed with Sir Ralph in The Heiress was when he comes home and hangs up his hat and coat. ‘How would you like me to do this?’ he asked. I said it’s a simple scene, just do it. And then Sir Ralph showed me what a man can do with a hat, cane, gloves, and coat. It was like a symphony” (Turner: 14). The scene in question is the moment when Sloper returns to the house and finds Catherine asleep on the couch, but obviously waiting up for him. He hangs up his things not casually but carefully, with the thoughtful air of a man who senses something momentous must have happened during his absence between Catherine and Morris Townsend, who has been a guest at their house earlier in the evening. Having thus hung up his things, Dr. Sloper wakens his daughter by shaking his keys near her ear — an interesting gesture, conveying the way the doctor likes to keep things at arm’s length, as it were, and also his instinctively distanced, slightly mocking attitude to his daughter. Even more remarkable than Richardson’s physical dexterity, though, is his vocal control

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and variety. This must be one of the most exquisitely pitched performances of the screen. When directing him in Long Day’s Journey into Night, Sidney Lumet recalled once how Richardson reflected for a moment after a long and elaborate suggestion from the director and then said sonorously, “I see what you mean, dear boy — a little more cello, a little less flute” (Lumet: 65). When you watch him in The Heiress, you know what he means. The words are not simply delivered but shaded and phrased in tone and given rhythmic variety and lilt. One could give numerous examples, but, for the moment, three will suffice. There is the scene at his niece’s engagement party when he contrasts Catherine’s awkwardness to the grace of his dead wife. His sister, Mrs. Almond (Mona Freeman), reproves him for idealizing his wife’s memory at the expense of ignoring Catherine’s compensating qualities. The doctor is severely displeased. “Only I know what I lost when she died,” he says, “and what I got in her place.” Richardson so contrives it that the second half of the sentence seems a dark modulation of the first, and its conclusion not just a diminuendo of disappointment but more like a brooding bass note of lingering pain. Then there is the terrible moment, on his return from Europe, when his health has deteriorated and his anger erupts after discovering Townsend has been in his house and Catherine has not changed her mind about him. He momentarily loses control. Of course the man is only after your money, he declares — striking his chair with his fist on the word “money” to reinforce the emphasis — because, after all, what other virtue have you? He sees something out of the corner of his eye, and he qualifies what he has just said by conceding Catherine’s one gift: “You embroider — neatly.” Richardson invests the calculated anti-climax of that demeaning adverb “neatly” with a bleak and wounding condescension that inexorably carries with it his own contemptuous assessment of her personality. It is emotionally devastating and the turning point in their relationship, the moment when it dawns on Catherine that not only is she a disappointment to her father but that he actually despises her. Richardson’s delivery of that line is like the twisting of a knife, the blade dripping, as it were, not with blood but with a withering disdain. It cuts not to the bone but to the soul. When Sloper knows he is dying, he instructs Catherine to keep Aunt Penniman out of his room, “unless,” he says, “I go into a coma.” Richardson delivers the last word with a brisk firm flourish of defiance, affirming at the end that even a comatose state would be preferable to what he now sees as his sister’s exasperating and destructive sentimentality. The casting of Montgomery Clift as Townsend was more controversial. At that time, Clift had only appeared on screen in Fred Zinnemann’s The Search (1948) and Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948), so his screen persona was not yet fixed in the audience’s imagination, which makes it more difficult to assess how the character is meant to be judged. Wyler had first fleetingly considered Errol Flynn for the part, but thought that, because of the actor’s reputation and persona as a rake, he would have been too obviously untrustworthy from an early stage. In his notebooks for the novel, James had made clear his disapproval of the person on whom the character of Townsend was based; and in the novel itself, Townsend’s mercenary motives are quite evident from a quarter of the way through. In Wyler’s conception and in Clift’s sensitive performance, the character becomes altogether a more vulnerable and ambiguous creation, understandably intimidated by the father (as Clift was by Richardson, apparently) and sometimes sensitive to Catherine’s feelings, as shown in his gift to her when she is leaving for Europe with her father. We learn that Morris has spent a small inheritance on a trip to Europe in his youth rather than look after his married sister, Mrs. Montgomery (Betty Linley). Are these the forgivable extravagances of youth or the actions of a wastrel? Expressive use is made in the film of an expensive pair of

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gloves that Townsend has once left at the Slopers’ house. For Catherine, they are a romantic reminder of him, and she fits her fingers dreamily over them in a gesture of intimacy and love. But for Dr. Sloper, they are a symbol of Townsend’s selfish profligacy, and, in his scene with Townsend’s sister, he is not slow to point out how they contrast in finery to the poor pair that she is wearing. To sustain the ambiguity, Wyler sometimes keeps Townsend in shadow, as at the end of the engagement party, or conceals his face from us at key moments in his love scenes with Catherine, so that one is never quite sure what he is thinking or feeling. Afterwards, accounting for the film’s disappointing box-office performance, Wyler wondered whether he had over-calculated the ambiguity of the Townsend character and made him a bit too charming, so that audiences felt let down and even sorry for him when Catherine rejects him at the end. But overall, Wyler felt his strategy had been the correct one. It complicates the characterization and prolongs our uncertainty and therefore our interest about Townsend’s actions and ultimate motivation. Taking a hint from the novel about Morris Townsend’s tenor voice, the film includes a moment from his early courtship of Catherine when he serenades her with a rendition of a popular song of the period, “Plaisir d’Amour.” The theme is featured over the opening credits, much to the chagrin of the film’s composer Aaron Copland, who had written his own title music; but the decision to include this theme at once might have been to alert the audience to the importance of the scene in which the song will be featured later. It is ostensibly a romantic moment — Catherine certainly registers it as such and its use elsewhere will be essentially to evoke Catherine’s romanticism — but she seems not to notice that the rendition is slightly off-key. The instrument sounds as if it needs retuning (by contrast, as Dr. Sloper will remind us, Catherine’s mother had a perfect ear for music). Yet, as Morris recites the words, a more somber note resounds: “The joys of love/Last but a short time/The pains of love/Last all your life/All your life.” The words are a premonition of Catherine’s fate. In Wyler’s and de Havilland’s hands, she will become one of the great jilted heroines of American cinema. The theme of romantic loss also implicates Dr. Sloper and his beloved wife, who has died giving birth to Catherine. Sloper keeps a portrait of his wife on his study desk and, in an ingenious dramatic stroke, it plays a key role in the scene in which Dr. Sloper interrogates Townsend’s sister, Mrs. Montgomery about her brother’s character. When Sloper is momentarily out of the room, she picks up the portrait and mistakes it as one of Catherine, and is struck by the difference between the implied elegance suggested by the portrait (we never get a good look at it and are thus invited to use our imagination about how she looks) and the plain gaucheness of Catherine — the point indeed that Sloper is endeavoring to make. Yet there is a deeper irony here. The implication is that his wife has played the same role in Sloper’s life as Townsend (the subject of the conversation) is destined to play in Catherine’s. The briefly idealized romantic object will disappear from their lives almost as soon as it has been claimed, leaving them both with an emotional wound that will never heal. One of the most moving moments in the film occurs much later in that same room when Dr. Sloper realizes that he is incurably ill. He walks to the door and then turns back, picking up the portrait from his desk and putting it in his pocket before exiting. It is a quietly poignant way of signaling his recognition that he will never be well enough to enter that study again, and so takes away what for him was always its most treasured object. It is a detail that is not in the novel and it is worth noting that the credits of The Heiress say not that it was “adapted from” but “suggested by” James’s Washington Square, as if to

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give it some room for maneuver. It would be unfair to criticize the film for not sticking to the novel if it was clear that was not its intention (it would be unfair anyway, given the difference in medium, but that is a different issue). The change of title is immediately interesting, putting the focus squarely on the heroine and also on the importance of her money. Part of the main appeal of the material for Wyler was the character of the heroine and particularly the fact that, because of what happened, she will be a quite different person at the end from the one she appeared to be at the beginning. In a piece on the film for the New York Herald Tribune (October 2, 1949), Wyler wrote, “Unlike so many films which leave their characters pretty much as they discover them, Catherine Sloper would undergo a series of experiences which would change the very texture and inner structure of her personality.” To accommodate that, the last third of the film is significantly different from the novel, offering tight-lipped triumph over ironic tragedy. There is nevertheless something distinctively Jamesian about Wyler’s artistic personality, a Hollywood director with a European sensibility, a skeptical view of aspects of American culture and society, and a stated preference for the domestic drama of the drawing room over the easy excitement of external action. The theme of domestic tyranny preoccupied them both. A year after Washington Square, James explored the theme of an American heiress in a European setting, trapped in a loveless marriage to a fortune hunter, in the greatest of his early novels, The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Domestic conflict is at the heart of numerous Wyler films, which are recurrently concerned with marriage, the family, and the clash of generations. The Heiress shares with a later Wyler film, The Big Country, the situation of a daughter needing to rid herself of the influence of an overbearing father figure; both movies have engagement party scenes where the relationship between father and daughter is emphasized. In The Heiress the situation is different because the engagement being celebrated is that of Catherine’s cousin, but there is a very interesting close-up of Catherine’s yearning face when Uncle Jefferson makes a speech in praise of his daughter. At first one might think she is envious of her cousin’s engagement, but, in retrospect, one suspects that what she envies is the paternal devotion of her uncle, which is so different from that of her own father. The situation of the younger generation ultimately rejecting the example of an embittered or corrupt parent figure runs all the way through Wyler’s films, from Come and Get it, The Little Foxes, and The Heiress to The Liberation of L. B. Jones. Another theme that might have appealed to Wyler is that of the passive figure who, through a series of circumstances, is ultimately forced into a more active role. In this, The Heiress anticipates the heroes of The Desperate Hours, Friendly Persuasion, The Big Country, and Ben-Hur. The film is one of his most powerful examinations of “the worm that turns.” In a claustrophobic masculine house, in which the sliding doors seem to turn the rooms into so many cells, the quiet heroine is variously buffeted by the rival challenges of scientific rationalism (her father), effusive romanticism (her aunt), and mercenary opportunism (her suitor). In the early stages, Townsend seems to invade her space, at one point even causing her to fall backwards through a door when he is urgently pressing his claims upon her. In the scene in Paris, it is Sloper’s somber mood that predominates over Catherine’s, a mood concisely suggested by a single shot of his isolation amidst the empty tables and chairs of the outdoor café, which his daughter only belatedly realizes was a favorite spot of Sloper and his wife. (When he decides there that they should return home and Catherine says, “I thought you wanted to see England,” Sloper replies, “I’ve seen England.” Richardson’s doleful delivery of that line might well have owed something of its relish to the difficulties he and Olivier were having with the management of the Old Vic at the time.) Catherine

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will finally and courageously have to negotiate a way through this treacherous path in order to assert her individuality and independence. Three characteristic staircase shots mark the different stages of Catherine’s emotional trajectory. Each shows her ascending the stairs at a significant dramatic point in the narrative. The first occurs after she has told her father of her engagement to Morris Townsend, and he has agreed to meet the young man the next morning. Her joyous ascent is crosscut with shots of her father’s pensive expression in his study; the contrast in mood is nicely caught in Aaron Copland’s music — a sparkling, skipping theme for strings for Catherine, but a more somber dark-hued woodwind-dominated motif for Sloper. Catherine has been heartened by her father’s promise, “I shall be as fair and honest with him as he is with his you,” quite failing to pick up the ominous undertone — the father’s doubt about the sincerity of Morris’s feelings. There is a superb moment when Catherine expresses her wonderment at Morris’s affections. As she says, “and he wants me,” the doctor quickly looks away, as if to conceal not only his embarrassment but his disbelief. One would like to think it could even be a shaft of compassion. He might be concealing his own feelings of unease in order to avoid hurting his daughter. (It is brilliantly acted by Ralph Richardson, one of countless tiny incisive gestures in which his performance is so rich.) The scene echoes an earlier one in the film, prior to the engagement party where Catherine is to meet Townsend for the first time, and where Catherine is eager to show off her new dress to her father. Again the mood is one of gaiety that modulates to a subtle disquiet, accompanied in a similar way by Copland’s economical, alert score. “Do I disturb you?” she says to her father as she comes into the room. “You’re not a disturbing woman, my dear,” he replies — not the most fulsome of compliments. “Is it possible that this magnificent person is my daughter?” he says on observing her dress, an ostentatious garment so unsuited to her demure character that he can barely conceal his sarcasm. (In the novel, it is said at this point that he hardly ever addressed his daughter except in an ironic tone, which suggests years of thoughtlessly chipping away at her self-esteem.) When she points out that the cherry-red color was a favorite of her mother’s, his expression changes but this momentary recollection brings a chill into the atmosphere rather than warmth. “Ah, but your mother was fair,” he says, “she dominated the color.” Catherine turns away, disappointed, and Copland marks the moment with a terse, low chord of finality. Both scenes have this ambivalence of feeling so characteristic of Wyler’s films, where elation and excitement can subtly yet so swiftly shift into apprehension and dismay. As in Jezebel, albeit in a very different and quieter way, another inappropriate red dress highlights a sense of discord. The second significant staircase shot is a complete contrast to the first in terms of mood. It is the moment when Catherine trudges up the stairs in the early morning hours after Townsend has jilted her. After her argument with her father, she and Morris had arranged an elopement, but he has not shown up. This is a major change from the novel, where the romantic relationship just dwindled away to nothing, and the film was inevitably criticized for substituting melodrama in place of Jamesian understatement. It seems to me an entirely permissible change, more suited to the filmic medium than James’s subtle winding down to an anti-climax, and sharpening the dramatic conflict. Coming after the terrible confrontation with her father and her throwing caution to the winds when reunited with Morris (the outburst of the “Plaisir d’Amour” theme when they embrace might have dismayed Copland, whose love theme is altogether more restrained, but it seems to me exactly right in catching Catherine’s romantic abandon at that point), the let-down is almost too much to bear. “Oh dear girl, why were you not a little more clever?” says Aunt Penniman

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to her when, waiting for Morris, they begin to suspect his desertion. (“Clever” is a word that is often used of Dr. Sloper in the novel: he is clever, but he is not wise.) She means that Catherine should only have told Townsend of her father’s disinheriting her after they had eloped. Catherine refuses to believe that would make any difference. What follows is one of the most carefully crafted sections of the film. The house seems suddenly like a prison from which Catherine must escape. One is aware of the curtains being rustled by the wind and of the coldness coming into the room from an open window that had formerly connoted impending freedom. Wyler tracks with Aunt Penniman as she moves away from Catherine to sit on a chair. The tracking shot continues for a moment to accentuate the sense of distance between the characters who now both seem isolated and forlorn. There is a dissolve to a close-up of Catherine as suspicion moves to certainty that her lover is not coming. Copland’s doleful score rises to a dissonant climax, the clock strikes and, as Catherine collapses into hysterical sobbing, Aunt Penniman rushes to close the doors before returning to comfort her niece. We never know exactly how much time has passed before she leaves the room to go back upstairs. Wyler’s shot from the top of the stairs as Catherine begins her ascent makes it seem like a steep and difficult climb, and imparts a feeling of heavy oppression. De Havilland’s performance at this point conveys a character who seems to have aged years in just a few hours. The story goes that it was many takes before Wyler was satisfied with that shot, feeling the actress needed some assistance or correlative to deliver the mood of limitless sorrow he was after. He finally hit upon the solution of filling de Havilland’s suitcase with books so that she could hardly carry it. The shot thus becomes a physical image of the heroine’s trauma. When she ascends those stairs, you feel as if she can hardly climb them for the sheer weight of misery that is pulling her down. The crushing of her illusions and fragile self-esteem could hardly be more absolute. She has not only been jilted by the man she loved, but her now-despised father has been proved right about Townsend after all. The third important staircase shot occurs at the end of the film, when Catherine ascends the stairs oblivious to the appeals of Townsend who is hammering on the door. Visually, there is a distinction to the previous staircase shots. Here Wyler ensures through camera placement that Catherine dominates the space in a way that clinches her new assertiveness. In the novel, when Townsend has returned, twenty years have passed. He is now stout and balding. Catherine can hardly believe she has expended so much emotion on a man such as that, and the reunion falls flat, with Townsend moodily disappointed and Catherine returning to her embroidery —“for life, as it were.” No doubt to the outrage of Jamesian purists, the film could hardly be more different. Here only five years have passed, Townsend is still a desirable prospect, and whereas in the novel it is clear that the man is still the same shallow opportunist he always was, in the film a certain ambiguity and attraction still cling to him. Rather surprisingly, he has still not married and there is a suggestion that a residue of feeling for Catherine remains, and that it is she who has changed and not him. Indeed, the film pulls some surprises and variations on the original at this point. Townsend’s defense of his conduct is that no man would wish to be the cause of a father’s disinheriting a daughter, but, unlike in the novel, Sloper does not, in fact, disinherit his daughter. The threat was meant to test Townsend. “I didn’t know that,” Townsend says, as if that still justifies what he did. “I know you didn’t,” replies Catherine knowingly, her inflection suggesting a completely different reading of his behavior. Townsend fails to pick up her sarcasm, just as Catherine had for so long failed to pick up her father’s, and is completely deceived by her manner. As a further irony, Townsend seems more impressed with her now than at any

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other stage of their acquaintance, just as Sloper has for the first time expressed admiration and pride in his daughter when he mistakenly believes that she has given up Townsend, and not that she has been deserted. In both cases the desired approval which she has sought for so long has come too late. “You have found a tongue at last,” Sloper says when her daughter turns on him, “but only to say such terrible things to me.” “Too late, Maria,” Catherine tells the maid (Vanessa Brown) when Sloper is in the last stages of his illness and asking for her at his bedside. Again unlike in the novel, she refuses to attend his death-bed. Momentarily one might feel that there is something of the same cruelty as Regina’s refusal to help her dying husband in The Little Foxes, but the differences are huge also. One is a calculated and almost murderous callousness; the other, a recognition of a hurt too deep for possibilities of reconciliation. In the film, all the major characters seem to grow more and more like the embittered Sloper. “We seem to like the same things,” Townsend says of Sloper, meaning the objects of the house rather than a liking for Catherine. The implication at that point is that his opinion of her is not that different from her father’s. Catherine grows harder, becoming heiress to her father’s temperament as well as his money, despising him as he has despised her, to the point in later scenes when she can hardly bring herself to look at him (when he enters her embroidery room and is clearly seriously ill, she prefers to acknowledge his mirror reflection rather than address him directly). The roles are reversed in her final scene with Townsend also: it is he who now looks foolish, naive, and romantic, and she who is controlled, detached, and ironic. When she gives Morris the gift of the ruby buttons that she had intended as a wedding present, he takes it as a sign of her renewal of her feelings. On the contrary, it is a sign of their closure. “Can you be so cruel?” asks Aunt Penniman, when she realizes Catherine has no intention of eloping with Townsend and is setting him up for a fall as emotionally devastating as the one she suffered. “Yes, I can be very cruel,” replies Catherine, “I have been taught by masters.” The word “masters” is important here — not simply “experts” but men who have bullied and dominated her, imposing on her feelings of inferiority and subservience. In this, both Wyler and his excellent writers, Ruth and Augustus Goetz, are being true to an essential aspect of James’s novel and picking up on its social critique — what Howard Pollack called its “ironic indictment of America’s nineteenth century bourgeoisie, with its men obsessed by the bottom line and its women deluded by romantic sentimentality” (Pollack: 433). The film’s ending — controversially perhaps, but with full intent — moves its heroine spiritually into the twentieth century. In the novel, after the bathetic return of Townsend, James leaves his heroine “picking up her morsel of handy-work” again, retreating back into her shell. In the film, by contrast, the return of Townsend seems to galvanize Catherine into closing forever that disastrous page of her life. She completes what she says will be the last embroidery she will ever do, sewing the letter “z” and then waiting to hear the bolting of the door against Townsend so that it coincides with her snipping of the last thread of cotton (impudently implying her castration of him, perhaps? It seems consciously and impeccably timed). The house at this juncture becomes effectively Catherine herself, barred from a masculine hammering at her defenses. From the outside, Townsend sees the light go out above the door, the fading of his hopes and of her feelings for him. As he continues to hammer at the door, Catherine climbs the stairs, but on this occasion Wyler’s camera placement ensures that she commands the frame and has a new certainty of movement. The future is unclear and the mood ambivalent, but patriarchy has been defeated. The heroine is left neither passive nor a victim but looking at a new start, a feminist in embryo.

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Detective Story (1951) “A brilliant director is the one who makes the right choices. William Wyler is a perfect example. He never told me what to do in Detective Story. He’d just squint and say, ‘Do it again.’ ‘Then we did it. And he knew when it was right, which take to choose” — Kirk Douglas, The Ragman’s Son: 324 “Clever, fluent transcription of a Broadway play with some of the pretensions of Greek tragedy: it could have been the negation of cinema, but professional handling makes it the essence of it” —Halliwell’s Film Guide: 268

The setting is a New York precinct police station. As a motley collection of social malcontents push (or are pushed) through the swing gates during a grueling 24 hours, a tough cop, Jim McLeod (Kirk Douglas), discovers some uncomfortable truths about his wife’s past and his own propensity for violence. Sidney Kingsley’s 1949 play had been a hit on Broadway (indeed, Kingsley had invited Wyler to invest in it as one of its financial sponsors), and while Paramount was dragging its heels over the release of Carrie, Wyler probably saw Detective Story as offering not only congenial material but something that looked comparatively straightforward to shoot. The settings were limited, and cinematographer Lee Garmes assured him that he could use a crab dolly that would permit fluent camera movement across the soundstage. Wyler could import some of the original actors from the Broadway production — Lee Grant as the flighty young shoplifter, Horace McMahon as the station’s commanding officer, Joseph Wiseman and Michael Strong as the two burglars — who would already have fine-tuned their roles. Because of limited exteriors and the fact that the entire set could be accommodated on the Paramount soundstage, the film was shot in sequence. Paramount set a tight shooting schedule of 36 days. To everyone’s amazement, given Wyler’s reputation for multiple takes, the film came in six days early. Wyler had originally asked Dashiell Hammett to adapt the text for the screen, partly out of friendship and partly out of Hammett’s demonstrable skill at writing the kind of hard-boiled dialogue required. However, when Hammett failed to deliver and returned his advance (perhaps recognizing he was no longer the writing force he once was, and because he was contesting the HUAC allegations against him), Wyler turned to his brother Robert and Philip Yordan to accomplish the adaptation. They stayed faithful to the original, and the main difficulty was in meeting the requirements of the Breen Office, particularly in terms of the role of the abortionist — a character who could not be accommodated within the Hollywood screen limits of the day. Accordingly, the character became, in Jan Herman’s words, “a doctor who delivers out-of-wedlock babies and gets rich by selling them in an illegal adoption racket” (334). The writers’ phrase for this is a “baby-farm grist-mill” which only tends to emphasize the clumsiness of the change. Wyler was upset because he thought the play was an eloquent condemnation of abortion that made the modification unwarranted, and he thought the Breen Office was behind the times in its adjudication of what the public was adult enough to see. As he said at the time: “There might be many things that I wouldn’t want my children to see, but that doesn’t mean I want to make pictures for children.” In the event, it seems likely that contemporary audiences would have understood what the real issues were. Kingsley himself was generous enough to say that he thought his text worked

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better on screen than on stage, because it seemed to have greater intensity; and he was particularly impressed by Eleanor Parker’s Oscar-nominated performance as McLeod’s wife, Mary, a pivotal role that takes the film in a different direction in its second half— from a drama about police routine to one that will move into realms of spiritual and psychological trauma. At first, the material seems essentially an ensemble piece, a day-in-the-life of a busy police station as seen initially through the eyes of a pathetic shoplifter (Lee Grant) who is alternately fascinated and appalled by what she sees, and whose role both helps to lighten the mood and gives an ordinary person’s perspective on events that are at times disturbing. The absence of any background music apart from brief surges over the beginning and end credits adds to the sense of realism. The specific postwar period is suggested by incidental details and characterization: an old lady who suspects her neighbors of making atom bombs (which might be the film’s comment on the contemporary excesses of postwar, and indeed Cold War, paranoia); a subplot involving a young war hero Arthur Kindred (Craig Hill) who has had difficulty in readjusting to peacetime America and now faces a charge of theft after stealing money from his employer in a futile endeavor to impress his erstwhile girlfriend with a meal at the Stork Club. One of the detectives, Lou Brody (William Bendix), has some sympathy for the young man, who reminds him of his son who was killed during the war. However, the arresting officer McLeod has no such compassion. When Arthur’s employer, Mr. Pritchett ( James Maloney), seems prepared to drop the charges providing the money is returned, McLeod pressures him into changing his mind, citing an early incident in his career as a cop when he was soft on a first offender, only for the youth to commit murder two days later. There is no corroboration for this story, and, in retrospect, one might even doubt the truth of McLeod’s tale — it suits his purpose at this stage — for the roots of his ruthlessness, it is revealed, go much deeper than this. As the day lengthens, the pressure begins to build. Wyler’s strategy is the same as that he deployed so effectively in Counsellor at Law. By confining the action mostly to the main office, with the occasional use of back rooms — the lieutenant’s office, the Records Office, etc.— he sustains the tightness of the play’s structure but gives it visual variety and the added impact that a telling close-up can bring. The men begin to perspire perceptibly; even the janitor complains of the mess they leave, wondering what kind of slums the men live in, suggesting that the line between their lives and that of the human flotsam that comes into the station is a very thin one. We never see any of the policemen’s homes, and Lt. Monahan (Horace McMahon) even shaves at work. Crime never sleeps. As McLeod dryly notes, it is the one business that never has a Depression. Gradually, however, the focus narrows and the palpable tension in the air begins to center on McLeod. His seemingly innate aggression — the way he kicks a chair toward a suspect, or slams a door so loudly that the shoplifter almost jumps out of her chair — is a dimension of his character that has already caused unease. Indeed, a lawyer, Endicott Sims (Warner Anderson), has been to see Lt. Monahan specifically to warn against any violence perpetrated by McLeod against a client whom Sims is representing, and whom McLeod has been persecuting. The warning will prove wellfounded. On Broadway, the role of McLeod had been played by Ralph Bellamy, but in the film it is played by Kirk Douglas, who brings to the part that cocky but coiled intensity (particularly emphasized here through the 24-hour time frame, where we can almost see him coming to a boil, minute by minute) that audiences of that time were becoming familiar with through contemporaneous films of his such as Mark Robson’s Champion (1949) and

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Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951). In their book America on Film, Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin comment astutely on the originality of Kirk Douglas’s screen persona at that time and the more complicated, conflicted image of the American male he represented. He seems to embody masculine virtues, they argue, but he is a hero whose bravado and virility often conceal “weakness and a lurking insecurity” (276). Douglas was often at his best playing characters whose self-definition seems perilously close to self-destruction (McLeod is warned at one stage by a friend that he is effectively “digging his own grave” by his behavior). The machismo of these characters has underlying elements of masochism and even martyrdom. (Subsequent roles such as Van Gogh and Spartacus will take this tendency in Douglas’s screen characterizations to an expressive extreme.) Other films from around this time showed disturbed cops brutalized by the job they do: one thinks, for example, of Dana Andrews in Otto Preminger’s Where the Sidewalk Ends (1951) and Robert Ryan in Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1951). However, whereas those films move toward a finale of reformation and redemption, Detective Story will take its anti-hero to destruction and downfall, and in every sphere of his life — professional, domestic, and spiritual. McLeod’s actions go beyond a natural desire for justice and also seem unmotivated by any sense of personal ambition. He is insubordinate and can even say “Yes, sir” in a way that makes it sound like an insult. He responds to the world around him with moral indignation. This is potentially dangerous for he is an avenger without mercy, at a certain point not very different from the criminals he deals with. (Even before the dramatic events of the finale, he is facing the possibility of dismissal from the force and imprisonment for assault.) We learn that the motivating force behind his behavior is a hatred of his criminal father, who drove McLeod’s mother to her death in an asylum. His ruthlessness is a reflection of his determination to repudiate his background. In the process, however, he has lost all sense of compassion and a capacity to compromise. To him, everything is black or white. He makes no distinction between conscious criminality and all-too-common human frailty, and this will be his undoing. In assaulting the discredited surgeon Karl Schneider (George Macready) who has been profiting from medical malpractice at the expense of his patients, McLeod will inadvertently set in motion a chain of events that will bring his whole world crashing down about him. Wyler is particularly adroit in his use of pacing and space from this point in the film. McLeod’s growing tension begins to spread panic around the station, conveyed in shifty looks and abrupt threats of violence. Wyler’s shrewd camera placement approximates to Lt. Monahan’s careful manipulation of space as he slips people into his office without McLeod noticing or maneuvers him out of the frame entirely for a short time so he can pursue the allegations against McLeod unimpeded. The tense scenes between McLeod and his wife take place in small cluttered rooms in the station that heighten the pressure on them, for they make intimacy impossible and implicitly emphasize how McLeod’s attitude about his job will invade his feelings about his marriage. A scene between McLeod and his partner, Lou, takes place on the roof, almost as a temporary respite from the hothouse below. McLeod tries to clear his head. In one of the film’s most expressive images, there is a confrontation between McLeod and Schneider’s lawyer, Sims, when the latter has said “Why don’t you clean your own house before throwing stones?” Although McLeod demands to know what the lawyer means, the low-angle shot with McLeod at the bottom right of the frame on the stairs makes McLeod seem suddenly off-balance, in an inferior position, even about to fall. For the first time in his scenes with Sims, the initiative has swung the lawyer’s way. This impression is reinforced by the quick way the policeman on duty at the desk, Gallagher

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(Frank Faylen), turns away and pretends to resume his routine work when he hears Sims’s remark. It is as if he senses that the lawyer has the upper hand and reacts quickly to stay out of the line of fire. By this time we are aware of what is behind the lawyer’s insinuation. McLeod’s assault on the abortionist Schneider has prompted an investigation by Lt. Monahan, which has revealed that McLeod’s wife, Mary, had been one of Schneider’s patients, having been made pregnant by a shady, married businessman Tami Giacoppetti (Gerald Mohr). The baby died at birth, and the strong implication is that it is as a result of Schneider’s operation that the McLeods have subsequently been unable to have children. The scene between Lt. Monahan and Mary McLeod, when all this comes to light, is sensitively acted and expertly filmed. Monahan is courteous but very direct in this scene in a manner that puts Mary slightly off her guard and that suggests the cop’s many years in the profession. He knows how to elicit information and is quick to pick up signs of unease, like Mary’s slight cough when he first mentions the name of Schneider (“Does my smoking bother you?”) or her quickness to look away when the name of Giacoppetti crops up. He might have sympathy for her feelings but overriding that is his desire to get at the truth. For her part, Eleanor Parker subtly suggests the feelings of panic-terror bubbling beneath the surface of ostensible calm. Wyler has been sparing in his use of close-ups up until this point, and the close-up of Mary now becomes a subjective projection of her own fear: the face might be revealing too much, there is nowhere to hide. The tension of the moment when Giacoppetti is mentioned is accentuated by Wyler’s slightly angled, behind-the-shoulder shot of Mrs. McLeod, which not only conveys the way she cannot look Lt. Monahan in the eye but also has the effect of suggesting something fearful creeping up behind her — which, of course, there is: her past. When Giacoppetti enters the room, she collapses into hysterical weeping, and the feeling is almost of a dam breaking. Years of repressed guilt, which she hoped would never be uncovered, suddenly and nightmarishly burst out into the open. The nightmare is just beginning, for Monahan has uncovered a darker truth than he anticipated: that McLeod knows nothing about Schneider’s connection with his wife, and will be devastated when he learns about it. There is a bleak irony, then, to McLeod’s actions. Without his persecution of and violence toward Schneider, which was morally rather than personally motivated, he might never have discovered his wife’s secret. The scenes between husband and wife become the dramatic core of the film, for the rigidity of his values now threatens the survival of his marriage. When she pleads for understanding, he snarls back at her, “What’s left to understand?” In a later scene, when he talks about trying to get what he calls “the dirty pictures” out of his mind, the low-angle shot gives the impression of a character staring into an abyss. Exhorted by his friends to forgive his wife, he will find it is too late. The revelation has not only given him a disturbing new insight into her, his response has given her a disturbing new insight into him. The consequences of his nature — the vindictiveness, the cruelty, his almost sadistic belief in the corruptibility of human nature, a life founded on hatred — rebound on him with redoubled force, for he loses the one thing he truly loves. When he protests to his wife, “I wasn’t myself,” she replies, witheringly, “You were never more yourself.” One might sense here a certain resemblance to the relationship between father and daughter in The Heiress, where the potential for love is there but where, in one moment, a character is driven into saying something so terrible that it can never be unsaid, and the delicate spring that has held the relationship together irretrievably snaps. A key motif in both is forgiveness, and the absence of forgiveness. In both films, the moral inflexibility of

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the men, which causes them to lash out at their daughter and wife, respectively, causes a wound so deep that it can never be healed, either in the victim or the perpetrator. The heiress will inherit her father’s cruelty, and McLeod has become everything he has hated in his father. It anticipates something that Esther will say to Ben-Hur in the later film, when he seems set on a path of revenge and destruction: It is as if he has become Messala. When Leslie Halliwell talks of the play’s “pretensions to Greek tragedy” (quoted in the epigraph) it is probably that aspect of McLeod’s characterization that he has in mind: namely, that for all McLeod’s positive virtues as a good cop — his honesty, courage and dedication — there is a fatal flaw in his character that will prove his undoing. The material also obeys the classical unities of time and place that add to the sense of its having the outlines of a carefully wrought tragic structure. The inevitability of McLeod’s fate is also emphasized by the fact that there are three significant moments where he could, escape his destiny, but in each case the moment is lost. The first occurs when he is about to leave the office for a dinner date with his wife at the precise moment when Schneider is led in, and McLeod cannot resist turning back to continue his vendetta against this man. It is a decision that will have fateful consequences. There is a similar moment later, when McLeod appears to have reconciled with his wife, but when he sees Schneider’s lawyer, he cannot resist making a cheap jibe about the latter’s having bribed a witness on his client’s behalf, which prompts Sims’s retaliatory remark about cleaning his own house. Suddenly, all of McLeod’s insecurities resurface (Who knows about his wife’s past? Might there be more that he has not yet been told?) and the suspicions they rekindle destroy any hope his wife might have that things can return to where they were. The final turning point occurs when Lt. Monahan orders him to go home, but McLeod hesitates, fatally. But then, what home has he now to return to? It is in this final scene that the film raises another issue relating to McLeod’s trauma: the religious dimension. “I could fall on you like the sword of God,” he has told Schneider in the police van, a striking phrase that at that time seems to have come out of nowhere. A little later, Arthur’s friend, Susan (Cathy O’Donnell), has accused him of behaving as if he were God, his judgmental certainty precluding any possibility of doubt or appeals for clemency. After discovering the connection between Schneider and McLeod’s wife, and then being confounded by the revelation that McLeod did not know of this connection, Lt. Monahan is left with a conundrum. What is the explanation for McLeod’s exceptional and particular persecution of Schneider, beyond even all the other criminals he deals with? It is only in this final scene that we learn of McLeod’s Catholicism and are thus left to infer that his special abhorrence of Schneider has to do with the particular nature of his malpractice, the fact that he is an abortionist. This revelation gives a further twist to the final scene. McLeod has just told his wife that he would blow his brains out if she left him but that is what she has done. Now the burglar ( Joseph Wiseman) seizes a gun from one of the detectives. As a four-time loser facing a life sentence, he has little to lose by creating carnage. Everyone is warned to back off but McLeod rises and moves towards him as if wanting deliberately to provoke a confrontation. “I was wondering when you’d get around to this,” he says (earlier he has described the villain ironically — maybe instinctively — as “a real killer”) and the feeling is that he has been waiting precisely for a situation like this that will offer some sort of deliverance. He moves forward; the burglar shoots him in the stomach before being overpowered by the other men. McLeod’s act of bravado and self-sacrifice seems unmistakably like a conscious act of suicide which, in Catholic terms, is the worst sin of all.

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Given this, it seems rather extraordinary that the Breen Office, which had refused to allow any explicit reference to abortion, passed over this incident without comment, for McLeod’s intentions here seem quite unambiguous. A close-up of him as the incident occurs conveys not fear but almost relief. This might be the way out, as he sees it, of his personal and psychological torment. He might hope that Mary will forgive him and he allows Lou finally to release the young man in his charge, but this feels like too little, too late, to save his soul. A priest is sent for and McLeod starts to recite his Act of Contrition, but he will be dead before he can complete it. A film of its time, Detective Story might also be seen as looking ahead to the “brutal cop” cycle of the 1970s, though McLeod has less in common with Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry or Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle in The French Connection (1971)— whose methods the films, with whatever qualification, ultimately invite us to endorse — than with Sean Connery’s tough police inspector in Sidney Lumet’s The Offence (1972), whose long exposure to criminals unleashes his own heart of darkness. Unlike McLeod, however, Wyler does not see things in simple terms of black and white (and incidentally, Wyler does include a black policeman in that station who has made the important arrest of the two burglars. When Y. Frank Freeman asked him why this character was black, Wyler replied: “Why not?”). Wyler understands the pressures the police are under but he pulls no punches in showing how suspects can be taunted, harangued, and threatened. Similarly, he shows that the so-called criminals are often as much the victims of their own weakness as any innate badness. Even the abortionist, thanks to George Macready’s fine performance, is given a patina of wounded dignity, though one senses the depravity beneath. Lee Grant’s shoplifter was certainly an eye-catching performance at the time. As well as being nominated for an Oscar, she won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival. The film’s funniest moment occurs when she is due to leave the station for her appearance in court and she bids farewell to everyone as if thanking them for having been invited to a quite exclusive party: cops and criminals look at her in total amazement. Joseph Wiseman’s role is described on the film’s DVD box as “an amusing burglar.” Certainly there are moments when his extravagant protestations cause us to smile, particularly when he is being threatened with violence at one stage by the police and he draws their attention to the notice on their display board, which proclaims that courtesy should be observed at all times. But by the end he has become anything but amusing. What is his breaking point? To answer that, one might recall a telling sequence of events when it seems that love is blossoming between Arthur and Susan as they wait for the young man to be charged. After noticing this, Wiseman’s burglar sarcastically croons a romantic tune and then goads Arthur, predicting that five years in prison will make him indistinguishable from any common criminal. As an audience, we are almost grateful to the burglar for cutting into the film’s one perilously sentimental scene, but the mood changes rapidly when Arthur tries to retaliate. He is constrained by his handcuffs, but Lou, stepping in on his behalf, kicks the burglar viciously on the shins. Even though the kick happens off-screen, Wyler (as he does when Jennifer Jones injures herself at her machine in Carrie) makes us feel the pain. What turns a burglar into a killer? It could be as little as an unpremeditated kick on the shins. If this is what awaits this no-hoper in the future, then he could broodingly conclude, as he nurses his bruise, that he might as well strike back. Violence breeds violence. Small wonder that when Arthur is set free, his promise never to return rings true, particularly in the light of what he has seen. When the young couple run out into the street at the end, one can almost feel the fresh air on their cheeks.

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Carrie (1952) WYLER: “But Carrie was a failure, though it wasn’t Larry’s fault. In fact, he spent a lot of time with Spencer Tracy listening to him speak. We changed the title of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie because we didn’t want people to think it was about a nun.” INTERVIEWER: “Why do you consider Carrie a failure?” WYLER: “Because it didn’t make a dime!” — From his interview at the National Film Theater in London, May 1981 “If there were any justice in the world, Laurence Olivier would have got an Oscar for his unforgettable performance in Carrie” — Michael Billington “We’re not exactly in need of anybody,” he went on vaguely, looking her over as one would a package” — Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, Chapter 3 “Such an atmosphere could hardly come under the category of home life. It ran along by force of habit, by force of conventional opinion. With the lapse of time it must necessarily become dryer and dryer — must inevitably be tinder, easily lighted and destroyed” — Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, Chapter 9

During the making of Carrie, star Laurence Olivier kept asking his director, “Why are you doing this picture?” It might seem a strange question, particularly as Olivier was giving arguably the finest — certainly the most cinematic — screen performance of his entire career. The question probably related to the relentlessly downbeat nature of the subject matter, an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s scandalous turn-of-the-century novel, Sister Carrie, published in 1900, which relates the downfall of a respectable restaurant and saloon manager who is reduced to poverty when he falls in love with a much younger woman, Carrie, and runs away with her to New York. Nevertheless, there was a possibly unconscious undertone to Olivier’s query also. The timing for a film like Carrie could hardly have been less propitious, as it was made and released during a period when McCarthyism was at its height and when pessimism was synonymous with being un–American. Paramount was extremely nervous about the film and delayed its release until the director agreed to cuts and reediting. In the event, the changes sanctioned by the studio did not save the film from being a commercial flop nor did they significantly diminish its grandeur, for this is one of Wyler’s greatest, albeit most harrowing, films. It was in 1947 when Wyler first thought of bringing the novel to the screen, and he inquired whether Lillian Hellman or Arthur Miller was available to adapt it. As it happens, they were not. Coincidentally, it was in that same year that the mother of Ginger Rogers appeared as a friendly witness before House Un-American Activities Committee and declared that her daughter had recently turned down the role of Sister Carrie because it was “open propaganda,” an early indication that Wyler’s choice of subject matter might prove to be contentious. Fortunately, Ginger Rogers was never on Wyler’s mind as a possibility for the role. His first choice was Elizabeth Taylor, who was later to give a striking performance in George Stevens’s Dreiser adaptation, A Place in the Sun (1951), based on the novel An American Tragedy. Unfortunately, Taylor, who was the right age for the role and who gave off an

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Growing attraction: Jennifer Jones and Laurence Olivier in Carrie (1952).

appropriate sensual allure that could credibly have ensnared an older man, was tied to her MGM contract. Jennifer Jones was cast as Carrie, with the approval of her new husband, David Selznick, who then proceeded to bombard Wyler with a succession of his legendarily lengthy memos which, at a fairly early stage in the correspondence, Wyler stopped reading. Although Jones’s casting was not universally approved (and her scenes with Olivier do lack a certain erotic charge), Wyler and his writers, Ruth and Augustus Goetz, declared themselves well satisfied with her performance. Wyler’s main difficulty while directing her was in concealing her pregnancy, which he learned about only after she had been cast. As for the role of Hurstwood, Wyler decided at a fairly early stage that Olivier was the actor he wanted. He required someone to be suave and sophisticated, so as to intensify the impact of the character’s precipitous fall, and he could not think of a contemporary American screen actor who could convey that, although Fredric March was a possibility in reserve if Olivier proved to be unwilling or unavailable. Wyler may have had another calculation in the back of his mind. One of the film’s most powerful sequences occurs midway through, between Hurstwood and a cocky private detective who has tracked Hurstwood and Carrie to a select New York hotel and is demanding the return of the money Hurstwood (unbeknown to Carrie) has stolen from his employer, Mr. Fitzgerald. The scene is desperate and painful, anyway, because of the unsavory relish of the detective’s manner and because it follows what is the only stretch of sustained happiness in the entire film (it lasts about a minute). What intensifies the discomfort, however, as Wyler would surely have foreseen, is

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the casting — the most esteemed actor of the age being taunted and humiliated by that villain of countless B-movie westerns, Ray Teal, here seeming lighter on his feet than ever before, the character having the time of his life and Teal enjoying his finest moments on film. Olivier himself was at first skeptical about taking on the role. He liked the script but wondered if he could manage the accent, feeling he would need a voice coach and the help of his friend, Spencer Tracy. He was persuaded to do it when it transpired that Vivien Leigh would be in Hollywood at the same time making A Streetcar Named Desire for Elia Kazan. In the event, after seeing the film, Dreiser’s widow, Helen, sent him a letter of congratulations on the accent and the performance, particularly the eloquence of his facial expressions. His eyes seem to grow smaller and more hooded as the character’s degradation advances, reflecting Dreiser’s own description of Hurstwood in Chapter 33 of the novel: “His eye no longer possessed that buoyant, searching shrewdness....” Eddie Albert proved to be perfect in the part of Charlie Drouet, the glib traveling salesman who embodies something of the brash commercial optimism of the new century. More difficult was the casting of Hurstwood’s wife, Julia. Ruth Warrick was originally selected but was replaced after two days of shooting by Miriam Hopkins. Warrick is best remembered for her role as Kane’s first wife in Citizen Kane; it is possible that Wyler felt she did not have the steel the part required to deal with Hurstwood’s indiscretions or to convey Julia’s ruthless pursuance of his destruction. In the novel, Julia’s clipped comment to Carrie when she meets her at last in the small apartment that she and Hurstwood share — “I thought you were going to be prettier”— epitomizes her malicious character, and you need a particular brand of actress to enjoy that extra twist of the knife. At the beginning of Chapter 12, Dreiser describes Mrs. Hurstwood as a “cold, self-centered woman” and says of her that “she would not delay to inflict any injury, big or little, which would wound the object of her revenge.” Ruth Warrack’s screen demeanor seems a little too placid to suggest that and perhaps not formidable enough to stand out against Hurstwood’s (or Olivier’s) rage, but this is certainly not the case with Miriam Hopkins, who invariably seems to have malice to burn. If there is one emotion as an actress Hopkins could convey incomparably, it is that of vengeful spite, and she relishes the opportunity here. The emotion was to achieve its apotheosis in her superb performance as Lily Mortar in Wyler’s The Children’s Hour. What appealed to Wyler most about the material, wrote Axel Madsen, “was the background, Dreiser’s intense feeling about poverty and social injustice, his description of the abject poverty during the triumph of American capitalism, his compassion for human sufferance and tolerance for transgression” (Madsen: 299). The issues and nuances of class conflict in the tale would also have attracted him, as well as the tragic downfall of a man who is not evil but, in the words of Paramount executive Barney Balaban (who had written a fan letter to Olivier after seeing the film), “utterly rent asunder” by the passion he feels and the mistakes he makes. The toughness and bleakness of the subject matter did not discourage Wyler in the slightest: on the contrary. In an interview in Variety (October 12, 1949), he said, “Mediocrity in films is the direct result of playing it safe. And audiences are not interested in mediocre films. A picture without an idea is a picture without vitality” (Powdermaker: 202). Unfortunately, as we shall see, the film failed to find an audience and remains one of Wyler’s most neglected works and one that, in Michael Billington’s phrase, “cries out for re-evaluation” (Billington: 5). Carrie’s first meeting with Hurstwood occurs around ten minutes into the film, when she goes to a bar-restaurant, Fitzgerald’s, where Hurstwood is the manager. Prior to that meeting, Wyler and his screenwriters, Ruth and August Goetz, have established Carrie’s

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desperate situation with admirable economy. At the beginning of the film we watch her say farewell to her family and leave her hometown Columbia City, Missouri, to take the train to Chicago, where she will board at her sister Minnie’s, who is married with a small son. We never see the family again, an interesting parallel with Hurstwood, who will also be permanently separated from his family, though for different reasons: Hurstwood takes money whereas Carrie hopes to make it. It is an early indication of themes that will be important later: rootlessness and the impossibility of returning to the past. Carrie has ambitions (“I can do better than Minnie,” she tells a travelling salesman, Charles Drouet, whom she has met on the train) but she finds her sister’s apartment cramped and drab; the husband, Sven (described in the novel as someone who “seemed to do all his mental operations without the aid of physical expression”), only seems interested in Carrie for the weekly five dollars rent that she pays. Even the child does not seem to like her much, a motif that will recur in the film. The only job she can find is soul-destroying labor in a shoe factory. Wyler’s panning shot across the assembly line reminds one almost of Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) in its evocation of the mechanization of the individual in a newly industrialized society — not the only Chaplinesque touch in the film, as we shall see. When Carrie in her poorly lit working space gets one of her fingers caught in her machine — an incident so suggestively yet potently filmed that one almost feels the pain oneself— her employer uses the occasion as an excuse to sack her. Desperate to find work, she seeks out Drouet (Eddie Albert), who has given her his card on the train and who loans her ten dollars for a new coat. He also persuades her to meet him that evening at Fitzgerald’s for a meal. Discovering the money and learning it is a loan from a man, her sister Minnie immediately suspects the worst and effectively turns her out of the house. When Carrie arrives at Fitzgerald’s that evening, she is, for obvious reasons, in a distressed state, with no money or prospects and on the point of having to return home. Wyler now includes a point-of-view shot of her looking through the window. It is an important moment: The elegance and plenty she sees is in sharp contrast to what she has experienced so far in the big city, but it is also the world she imagined for herself when she left her hometown for Chicago. She will carry frustrated aspiration as well as anxiety into that restaurant, and that mindset will partially determine what follows. Significantly, and ominously, Carrie will enter through the wrong door: She inadvertently enters the bar, which is exclusively male territory. It is an omen for Hurstwood more than for Carrie, for if she had not done so, he might never have noticed her and the whole future direction of his life would have been different. The film is full of such portents, with an almost Hardyesque sense of overwhelming fate where seemingly tiny moments of opportunities taken or lost will have profound consequences out of all proportion to the event itself. In this particular case, Carrie’s wrong entry will anticipate a series of critical scenes that take place around doors and doorways that will come at crucial turning points in the characters’ destinies and emphasize the precariousness of their situations. Hurstwood’s inadvertent shutting of the safe door behind him while he checks his employer’s money might be accidental but it will turn out to be the moment when his fate is sealed. The scene when Hurstwood persuades Carrie to come away with him on the pretext that he has heard that Drouet has been hurt in an accident takes place around the bolted door of Carrie’s room, she having decided never to see him again after learning that he is married. When she discovers his lie, she attempts to leave the train, but he stops her in another charged conversation at the carriage doorway, where he again deceives her by saying his wife has agreed to a divorce but giving Carrie the option of leaving the train at the next station. The tension

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grows as Carrie prepares to disembark, recognizing that the next step she takes — whether to return to the train or leave — is another of those supercharged moments that could determine a person’s whole future. She turns back and the pair embrace, but they are startled out of their reverie by the sound and motion of a train hurtling in the opposite direction, which makes them cling together even more tightly. It could be fate bursting into their momentary happiness; it is certainly a reminder of Drouet, for Carrie has been similarly startled by the sound of a rushing train during her first meeting with him on the journey to Chicago. Even in moments of snatched happiness, it is a relentlessly tense, unrelaxed film, with hardly a scene in it that does not at some point contain a moment or visual area of discomfort or threat. Everything will move inexorably to the final shot — the open door of Carrie’s theater dressing room, which looks forlorn, temporary, undomesticated, and unoccupied as she searches for some food for her former lover, who, in her absence, has exited for the last time and is heading for a lonely death. The film was criticized for softening the ending of the novel, in which Hurstwood commits suicide: the scene was filmed but it was cut by the studio. However, what we are left with seems to me every bit as harrowing, a man without the will to end it all (he switches on the gas tap and then switches it off again) and seemingly consigned to a continuing living hell. During their first meeting, when Hurstwood shows Carrie the correct entrance and she enters, there is a remarkable panning shot of the two of them walking parallel to each other in the adjoining rooms — bar and restaurant — which are separated by a half wall. Their parallel movement here, as well as hinting at the future welding of their fates, also suggests an ultimate similarity of situation but, in Hurstwood’s case, dramatically heightened. Carrie has come to the restaurant to return Drouet’s ten-dollar bill, with its unpleasant associations of her being a kept woman. But Drouet insists that she keep it; and the bill that sticks to her, as it were, symbolizes how she herself will be stuck to Drouet and, because of her material predicament, unable to escape from the compromising circumstance in which he has placed her. Coincidentally, Hurstwood will find himself in a similar situation, with money that he cannot return (the safe is locked), but this time the sum is a thousand times larger and the effects are to be much more catastrophic. In the novel at this point, Hurstwood will dash with the money to Carrie’s apartment to persuade her to run away with him, but the film inserts a remarkable sequence that seems both to deepen Hurstwood’s dilemma and reinforce the sense of his being now in the grip of some malign fate. In turmoil at the prospect of losing Carrie, Hurstwood returns home to find that his employer, Mr. Fitzgerald (Basil Ruysdael), has come to call. Like Carrie, Hurstwood begins to attempt to return money that does not belong to him — he has actually taken the envelope from his pocket — but is totally distracted from this intention when Fitzgerald interrupts to tell him that he has arranged with Julia for Hurstwood’s salary to be paid directly to her in order to put an end to his relationship with Carrie. It is a meticulously composed and superbly acted scene, with Hurstwood upstaged and outflanked by two determined antagonists. On the left, Basil Ruysdael’s Fitzgerald oozes a feeling of sanctimonious rigidity; on the right, Miriam Hopkins’s Julia rocks forward in her chair in an attitude of grim contentment at this fait accompli; and in between, Olivier’s Hurstwood seethes with impotent rage, recognizing how both have deliberately stripped him of his capital, his social position, and any potential for future happiness. The atmosphere is so hostile that there is one moment when Hurstwood, in a fury of frustration, seems on the point of attacking Julia. She momentarily cowers but then stiffens and flames defiance; Olivier and Hopkins are at their finest here. The camera stays on Hurstwood as he storms out of the house in a blind rage. It is

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small wonder that it is only then that he looks down at his hand and realizes that he is still clutching the envelope full of money that he was to return to Fitzgerald. The camera halts with him, marking this as the dramatic crux of the film, for the next step he takes will determine his life’s outcome. Should he go back to the house or should he run to Carrie? His downward path will derive from the choice he makes. Later in the film, there will be a similar moment when Julia and her lawyer, Mr. O’Brien (Harry Hayden), visit Hurstwood and Carrie in their apartment and insist that he sign over all their properties to Julia or she will take steps to have him imprisoned for bigamy. Believing that Hurstwood is already divorced, Carrie is shocked and exits the room. As Hurstwood follows her to explain, the lawyer persuades Julia to yield a small proportion of the revenue to her husband. After all, if he is in prison, she will get nothing. However, before this revised arrangement can be put to him, Hurstwood (ironically, rather like Fitzgerald in the showdown with him) leaps in with his own proposal and says that, if Julia will give him an immediate divorce, he will do anything she wants. Just a tiny smile of complicity between the lawyer and Julia betrays the fact that they are getting a better deal than she bargained for. The lawyer then looks discreetly for the tiniest sign of mercy on Mrs. Hurstwood’s face. There is none. She wants her last pound of flesh. (It is in moments like these that one recognizes why Wyler needed an actress of Miriam Hopkins’s presence to give the scene its full force.) Hurstwood’s impetuosity has robbed him of the financial stability that would have arrested his fall. One by one these fateful moments will combine to destroy him. His descent into poverty is inexorable. Because the news of his theft has been widely publicized, he finds it impossible to hold a job. Everything seems to collude in his degradation. His first employer evidently relishes his humiliation, sarcastically calling him “Rockerfeller” before dismissing him. When he attempts to buy the opportunity of another job as dishwasher from a fellow unemployed worker and tells him of his misfortune, the man mocks his distress. The world is pitiless to the poor. When his one good pair of trousers is splattered with mud by a passing truck, the indignity is intensified by the fact that the truck is carrying barrels of beer, as if in mockery of his former preeminence in the liquor trade. As his self-respect diminishes, so inevitably does Carrie’s respect for him, and she chides him for talking about the past. When Carrie has a miscarriage and senses that Hurstwood is secretly relieved, she is deeply upset but at the same time determines to take matters into her own hands. Jennifer Jones is particularly good in this scene, suggesting the way the heroine’s renewed resolve arises from her distress and her recognition that her future might have to exclude Hurstwood. “When you’re 80...” she says; the phrase seems to pierce him like a dagger, painfully exposing the disparity in their ages, the unlikelihood of children and, perhaps subliminally, the impossibility of a future. “I’m still young,” she goes on. “I’m going to live — somehow.” The film now moves into a phase where Carrie will begin to pursue her dormant love of the theater and land minor roles in stage revues. In a note to his screenwriters, Wyler stressed how important it was to show Carrie’s development, and the fact that she cannot be condemned for leaving Hurstwood. She is moving beyond a dependence on men who have been guilty of manipulating her for their own satisfaction, and taking charge of her own life. In this, she recalls the characterization of Catherine Sloper in The Heiress. One of the screenplay’s imaginative additions to the novel is a sequence where Hurstwood reads of his son’s marriage in the society columns of his newspaper and resolves to meet him when he and his bride disembark at New York Harbor. “He’s a man in love

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himself now,” he says, “he’ll understand everything I’ve done.” He tells Carrie that he and his son were once close, and one thinks back to that earlier scene between the two of them after Julia, before retiring to bed, has expressed her displeasure at her son’s plan to go out late with his friends. The young man confides to his father that he is meeting a girl. “She’s waiting for me,” he says, to which Hurstwood replies, “You’re lucky.” Olivier accompanies the line with just a slight movement of his head in the direction of the stairs that lead to his wife’s bedroom. It is a tiny gesture that nevertheless imbues the line with an extra degree of wistfulness and sadness, and one of countless such details that makes Olivier’s performance such a masterpiece of observant and restrained screen acting. Momentarily, as he prepares for this reunion, Hurstwood rediscovers some of his old dignity and grandeur, and quite fails to notice Carrie’s underlying sadness when she says farewell at the door. She has resolved to leave him on the assumption that he will be better off with his son. In fact, the reunion never happens. When he sees his son and his new wife being greeted by the in-laws at the pier, Hurstwood’s courage fails him and he turns silently away amidst the bustle and the noise, clearly feeling like a poor relation and not wishing or daring to cast a cloud over his son’s happiness. The mood carries over into the next scene when he returns home, seemingly still in shock, fumbling to open the door and then sinking morosely into the rocking chair. His newspaper (which had initially carried the glad tidings) slips unnoticed to the floor. Locked inside his cocoon of personal pain, Hurstwood realizes he is alone. An almost imperceptible dissolve will convey not only the passing of time but a shiver of apprehension as it slowly dawns that Carrie has left him. When he enters her room, there is a note, but the cupboards and drawers are bare. The camera lingers on Hurstwood’s face, which is benumbed with grief, as he retrieves the last remnant of Carrie’s presence, a hairpin left in the drawer. When we later see Hurstwood’s pitiful collection of personal possessions wrapped up in paper in the flophouse, we notice that he has kept the pin as a memento. The flophouse scene was considered so grim that it was cut by the studio and removed from all American prints of the film. Wyler always felt this did the film great harm, because, without it, one misses the full force of the contrast between Carrie’s limited capacity for love and where Hurstwood’s boundless passion had taken him. One also misses the full poignancy of his meager belongings in these straitened circumstances, where he still clings to the theater program and Carrie’s hairpin. The scene seems to have survived in all European prints and has been restored for the film’s DVD release. It begins with a chilling overhead shot of the dismal cubicles where the men sleep, and the sound of coughing and retching as the men are rudely awakened at 7 A.M., the camera moving over this site of suffering before coming to rest on Hurstwood, who is haggard and seriously ill. Some time has passed and this is the most distressing image yet of his degradation. The composer David Raksin thought the scene so powerful that it made a contribution from him superfluous. He was at first dismayed when Wyler insisted on music and wanted something quite emphatic. However, his solution was unusual and effective, a skeletal orchestration of a waltz theme associated with Hurstwood in his prime. “I took a celesta and had them tape the bars, so that it would look like a doll’s piano,” Raksin said. “I played the waltz on this thing in a halting way, as a child would. The notes were dull and non-reverberating. It meant little when we recorded it, but when we put it in the film the effect was absolutely hair-raising — all of a sudden you felt as if your skin was crawling” (Thomas: 165). The final meeting between Carrie and Hurstwood abounds in heartbreaking ironies. Now a broken man and wandering the streets, Hurstwood sees a poster for the Gaiety The-

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ater in which Carrie is displayed as one of the supporting players in a show called “Ladies in Waiting.” His shadow falls across her face in the poster, just as he is the shadow in the background of her good fortune, and has been reduced to a shadow of the man he was before he met her. When he waits for her behind some stairs outside the stage door and calls her name when she passes, he is standing in the same position as he was those few years ago, after he had seen her stage debut and told her she should push her luck — effectively, the night he puts into her mind for the first time the thought of leaving him. She is wearing the same veil she wore when she met Hurstwood secretly in the park and was happily in love and agreed to run away with him before she knew of his marriage. Every detail of the present seems to bring back the past with redoubled force, which perhaps explains why Carrie seems so anxious to atone, as she sees it, and assuage her guilt at what she has done to him. But they are Hurstwood’s own mistakes, not hers, as he himself acknowledges. There is a moment when she switches on the light and is truly shocked by the human wreckage she sees, not dissimilar to the moment in A Streetcar Named Desire when Mitch turns the spotlight on the heroine and extinguishes her illusions. To Carrie’s offer of trying to restore his health and stature, Hurstwood replies, “Don’t live in the past, remember?,” quoting her own words back at her and weakly trying to wave his finger in mock admonition. In Olivier’s marvelous delivery, Hurstwood tries but has not quite the strength to deliver the line as an ironic joke; it comes over more as a melancholy croak. If there is one detail more than any other that breaks the heart, it is Carrie’s offer of money, which he will later replace in her purse in exchange for a few coins. She has given him a ten-dollar bill. All those years ago it was a ten-dollar bill to Carrie that set in motion this tragic chain of events that has brought a decent but flawed man to his knees. Although the final cut of the film was ready in March 1951, the picture was not released by Paramount until July 1952, during which time Wyler had completed and released one film (Detective Story) and was now working on another (Roman Holiday). He had right of final cut and could have resisted but Paramount was under no contractual obligation to release the film if Wyler did not accede to the studio’s wishes. Wyler believed, rightly, that he had made a great film version of an American literary classic, but he was also in no doubt that the film was a victim of the times. The so-called “super-patriots” (Wyler’s scornful phrase for the conservative forces rampant in McCarthyist America) thought the film “un– American,” even though, as he pointed out, “it takes place on the Bowery every day and even though Dreiser’s story took place forty years earlier” (Herman: 330). Carrie was like other brave American movies of that time that failed to find favor, like John Huston’s Red Badge of Courage (1951) and Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), which told harsh truths that no one wanted to hear. It probably did not help either that it had some resemblances to Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight (1952): the relationship between older man and younger woman, the rise/ \ fall structure, the theatrical imagery, the reduction of the main character to a tramp — in the year when Chaplin was, to all intents and purposes, forced into exile by his adopted country for his political beliefs. One could almost see it as Wyler’s Magnificent Ambersons, though the cuts made in the end were far less drastic than those suffered by Orson Welles. Carrie remains a major achievement blessed with one of the screen’s great performances. In a review of Olivier’s work, Michael Billington wrote that “Olivier meticulously charts every phase of the hero’s downfall (still wearing his black Homburg to the last) and through the simple device of not seeking our tears, instinctively earns them” (Billington: 5). When Hurstwood does break down in tears at one stage, he has his back to the camera and the

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film fades quickly and discreetly to black, as if respecting the character’s embarrassment. Billington’s tribute in his last phrase to the restraint of Olivier’s performance could also be applied to Wyler’s direction, and may indeed be the key to Olivier’s triumph. There is not a self-consciously beautiful or arty composition in the whole film (indeed, in Wyler’s whole career) and yet somehow his dramatic instincts with the camera are unerring. I think of that moment when Hurstwood rushes down the stairs after his argument with his wife and which Wyler, to Olivier’s intense annoyance, filmed again and again until he was satisfied. In the film Hurstwood slightly catches his hand on the banister, which is like a momentary exclamation mark of anger: almost subliminal, but it was the spark Wyler was looking for. I think also of that moment when Carrie leaves the carriage to return to her apartment after a night at the theater and Hurstwood, clinging to her hand, is suddenly half-hanging out of the carriage and looking like an ungainly aging Romeo. The pose is so unlike Drouet’s slick, man-of-the world routine with the coachman earlier in the film as he maneuvers Carrie into his apartment. By contrast, Hurstwood is a man in love for the first time in his life. As he watches Carrie go, Wyler holds the shot long enough for us to feel Hurstwood’s yearning. It represents the view of a man who cannot takes his eyes off his beloved but who, seeing her disappearing in the distance, might sense even then that she could be taking his life away with her.

Roman Holiday (1953) “I remember Willy Wyler saying to me once, ‘I don’t see why anything shouldn’t be told through a love story.’ And he could do it. Look at Roman Holiday” — David Lean “It’s always open season on princesses” — Eddie Albert’s photographer in Roman Holiday “Well, life isn’t always what one likes, is it?” — Gregory Peck’s reporter in Roman Holiday

“Is this the elevator?” queries the escaped princess (Audrey Hepburn) as she sleepily tries to familiarize herself with unexpected and less than regal surroundings. “It’s my room,” replies the American journalist (Gregory Peck) somewhat huffily, given that he has actually rescued her from falling asleep on a park bench. Much later in the film, a press photographer (Eddie Albert) wanders into the embassy and surveys the opulent surroundings. “It ain’t much,” he comments ironically, “but it’s home.” Wyler’s characteristic play with various forms of social disparity surfaces again in this enchanting tale of a princess on a goodwill tour of Europe who escapes from her palace one night and has a day in Rome with the common people before returning to the royal bedchamber round about midnight. In the process she becomes involved with an American reporter, Joe Bradley (Peck), who pretends not to know who she is so that he can obtain a royal scoop. Romantic complications change the plans of both characters, and the earlier jokes about rooms, houses, and where people belong are wistfully recalled when the two are alone staring out of the window in their respective abodes — in effect, their separate worlds — and a yearning slow dissolve signifies a silent wish that they could change places, that one would fade into the other in a way that would bring them together.

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Although now one of the most popular and beloved of Wyler’s films, Roman Holiday had a complicated and indeed controversial genesis. Possibly because of its thematic similarity to the screwball comedy classic, It Happened One Night (1934), about a romance between a runaway heiress and a newspaperman, the project had first been offered to director Frank Capra, who turned it down when he thought he could not bring it in within Paramount’s budgetary limitation of $1.5 million. The story was originally credited to Ian McLellan Hunter, who was to win an Oscar for it but who was to reveal years later that he had actually “fronted” for Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten who had been imprisoned for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee about whether or not he had been a member of the Communist Party. Hunter had secretly passed on his payment of $50,000 to Trumbo to help him through the period of the blacklist. (It will be remembered that Trumbo won another inadvertent Oscar during this infamous period when his 1956 screenplay for The Brave One, written under the pseudonym Robert Rich, was also honored and his identity revealed, much to the embarrassment of the Academy.) Trumbo died in 1976 without ever mentioning Roman Holiday among his credits. It was Hunter who later revealed the story. Trumbo’s name was restored to the credits in subsequent prints of the film and his widow finally was presented with the Oscar on his behalf in 1993. Another casualty of the blacklist from the Roman Holiday team was Lester Koenig, who had been an important assistant to Wyler since The Best Years of Our Lives. He had been one of the people named as a Communist sympathizer by the writer Martin Berkeley, one of the most notorious informers of the period. Y. Frank Freeman had to explain to the American Legion why, contractually and commercially, Paramount had been unable to fire Koenig until Roman Holiday had been completed. “The services of Lester Koenig,” he wrote, “in helping William Wyler to coordinate and to bring together the elements necessary to complete the work were essential. The failure to have him do this could seriously have jeopardized the whole venture. Mr. Koenig’s name will in no way appear in connection with the production of this picture....When his contract expires in August it will not be renewed.” In quoting this letter in his indispensable book on the blacklist, Naming Names, Victor S. Navasky ironically observed how such compromises were “transacted in the language of capitalism footnoted by the language of anti–Communism” (148); and how the American Legion “were only too happy to bend the blacklist system to the requirements of the studio system” (147). Profit talked louder than political principle. Wyler wished to intercede on Koenig’s behalf but Koenig refused to be the recipient of what he perceived as special favors when other comrades in a similar position had no such contacts to help them. The McCarthyist hysteria in America had driven Wyler’s close friend John Huston into exile in disgust, and there is little doubt that it was a powerful motivating factor behind Wyler’s decision to do Roman Holiday, and his insistence on filming it on location. For personal, political, and financial reasons it suited him to be out of America for a while. A comedy — his first for nearly twenty years — might be an invigorating change of pace. Shooting on location gave him a certain amount of freedom from day-to-day studio pressures, welcome after the interference which he felt had damaged the release of Carrie. It also probably reflected his recognition that, to make the subject work, Rome itself would have to be a star of the picture. It is worth remembering that, in those days, foreign travel was much less common than it is today. Wyler’s exploitation of the location would have had a considerable novelty value for many audiences of the time, making the film something of a Roman holiday for them also. It was a lesson taken to heart by David Lean when shooting

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Summer Madness in Venice two years later very much in the style of Roman Holiday, in the sense that it took full advantage of the visual spectacle of the city that would impress the inquisitive tourist. Lean had the advantage of color; one of the concessions Wyler had to make in Roman Holiday was obeisance to Paramount’s insistence that, if he wanted to film it on location, for financial reasons it would have to be shot in black and white. Wyler was to say that he regretted having to agree to that, though it could be argued that the film benefits from its monochrome photography. With location shooting reminiscent of benign neo-realism that anticipates the loose-limbed style of the Nouvelle Vague, the film gives off a whiff of European sophistication and class that is distinctively different from other Hollywood romantic comedies of the time. If it had been shot in color, the splendor of the surroundings might have overwhelmed the characterizations. There is some dispute about the significance of the cinematographer credit being shared between Franz Planer and Henri Alekan (who was best known at that time for his photography of another film fairy tale, Jean Cocteau’s 1946 classic, Beauty and the Beast). In his book on Audrey Hepburn, Charles Higham disputes the explanation given in Axel Madsen’s biography of Wyler and claims that “Planer fell out with Wyler and was replaced by Henri Alekan on the invented grounds that Planer was ill” (49). However, he offers no evidence for his assertion that the explanation for Planer’s replacement was a pretext. In fact, in a letter to Wyler ( July 26, 1952), Planer wrote that he had been advised by his doctor to take a complete rest and that failure to do so could risk serious illness. The letter concluded with a profuse apology and a hope that their association might be renewed in the future. In his cabled reply of August 18, 1952, Wyler acknowledged that he had been driving his technical team hard because of the difficult conditions and pressures of time, which might have contributed to Planer’s illness or desire to withdraw. However, he reiterated his complete confidence in Planer’s competence and, subject to the doctor’s approval, hoped Planer would now feel sufficiently rested to return to the production, which had at most only another six weeks to run. In the event, Planer was not well enough to return, but the suggestion that the two had “fallen out” is belied by the fact that Wyler was to reengage Planer for The Big Country and The Children’s Hour. Planer was also to become Audrey Hepburn’s favorite cameraman. Gregory Peck was philosophical about why he was cast in the role of the American reporter. “I always assumed,” he said, “that when people send me a comedy script, it had first been sent to Cary Grant, who turned it down.” In this instance he was absolutely right, for Grant had indeed turned it down because the girl had the key role. Peck agreed, to the extent that he stipulated in his contract that his name should not be alone above the title but that he should share top billing with the relative newcomer, Audrey Hepburn. This was not altruism, he said: it would simply have looked ludicrous otherwise. In fact, Peck gives one of his most accomplished screen performances, intelligently restraining any suggestion of flirtatiousness to emphasize the reporter’s preoccupation with the scoop, which in turn adds to the shock of revelation when he realizes late in the game that he is actually falling for her. In describing Peck’s personality and screen persona, the distinguished screenwriter Casey Robinson observed, “Solid, kindly, dignified, likeable and somewhat self-effacing, he is at his best in roles that match these qualities” (Shipman: 161). Wyler relaxes the occasional stiffness of that persona by the simple expedient, he said, of allowing him to put his hands in his pockets. So he is gallant without being sanctimonious; physically graceful when need be, as when deftly maneuvering a sleepy princess up the winding steps to his room; and adept in his comedy timing, as in the moment when the princess asks what line of work he

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is in, and a horse goes past. Hardly missing a beat, he replies, “I’m in the selling game ... fertilizer.” Wyler amusingly undercuts Peck’s image of stuffy nobility by putting him in seemingly compromising but innocent situations: she wakes up in his pajamas; he gives her money to get home under the suspicious eye of the caretaker who clearly thinks it is for services rendered; and a hilarious moment when he tries to slip a camera away from a schoolgirl to snatch a picture of the princess, only to have her suspicious school friend, clearly forewarned about such potential incidents from strangers, pipes up “Hey, Miss Webber” to her teacher, who is swiftly on the scene as a picture of disapproval. (The joke was privately enhanced by the fact that the school friend was played by Wyler’s daughter, Catherine, and the girl with the camera was Catherine’s younger sister, Judy.) Peck’s performance is ably abetted by Eddie Albert’s adroit turn as Peck’s comedy foil, the press photographer Irving Radovich, who is privy to the reporter’s scheme but is continually on the receiving end of kicks to the ankle, spilled drinks, and upturned chairs when he inadvertently threatens to blow the reporter’s cover. The part is quite sparsely written. Radovich is given a beard to suggest his artistic bohemianism and to facilitate a joke when an enthusiastic workman, mistakenly assuming Radovich is best man at his friend’s wedding, is about to kiss him and then, feeling the beard, thinks better of it. Wyler contrives an elaborate bit of comedy business to give an insight into the photographer’s eccentric working methods. As described in the shooting script, it says: “He is lying on his back holding a camera, next to a tub filled with water, which produces a ripple effect on the ceiling. On his leg is attached a piece of string which runs up to a fishing rod, held by a model who sits on the upper level of the studio, her legs sticking out through the balcony.” Otherwise it is all up to the actor. Albert was nominated for an Oscar for his performance and he deserved it, because, although his part is little more than a series of pratfalls, he handles the slapstick with a bemused grace that both endears you to the character and enhances the humor. Also, he is superb in the final scene at the embassy reception, where simply his looks and expressions explain his actions without the need of words. Like Fay Bainter’s performance in Jezebel, it is one of those skilled and unselfish pieces of film acting whose function is essentially to support the star and which does so unobtrusively but with immaculate professionalism. When casting the heroine, Wyler looked to Europe rather than Hollywood. “I wanted someone you could believe was brought up as a princess: that was the main requisite,” he said, adding ruefully, “besides acting, looks, and personality.” Two Hollywood-based but British-born stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Jean Simmons had been considered, but both proved contractually unavailable (to Simmons’ everlasting regret, though she did send an elegant letter of congratulations to Audrey Hepburn after seeing her performance). Also in the running was Suzanne Cloutier, who had been Desdemona to Orson Welles’s Othello in his 1952 film and was shortly to marry Peter Ustinov. However, it was Audrey Hepburn, at that time enjoying great success on Broadway in the title role of Gigi, who seemed the favorite. Her now-famous screen test clinched her selection. It was directed by the great British filmmaker Thorold Dickinson, for whom Hepburn had recently worked in Secret People (1952). Wyler instructed him to leave the camera running for a moment after the screen test was over to get a sense of the actress in an unguarded moment. Everyone was enchanted; the part was hers. As Billy Wilder was later to reflect in his book-length conversation with Cameron Crowe, “She was a thing made in heaven. It was obvious from her first Hollywood picture, Roman Holiday” (219). The film opens with a simulated newsreel of Princess Ann’s goodwill tour of European

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capitals — London, Amsterdam, Paris, and now Rome. The narrator comments that “the smiling young princess showed no sign of the strain of one week’s continuous public appearance.” The first sign of strain that Wyler shows us is a discreet shot of the princess’s right foot, hidden beneath her dress and wriggling free of her shoe for a welcome stretch, as the princess greets what seems like an endless line of guests who are attending a formal reception at her country’s embassy. It is a glimpse behind the public façade of royalty to its more common aches and pains. The ambassador (the redoubtable Heathcote Williams) has already restrained her with a gentle hand on her arm when she wishes to sit down; and her unavailing attempt to retrieve her shoe without provoking a diplomatic incident causes some consternation among her staff. A lightly amusing incident on the surface, it also hints at broader themes: for example, a missing slipper motif that foreshadows the variations the film will play on the Cinderella theme. More immediately, indicating that, for a princess, even the simple act of shedding and then losing a shoe can develop into a major and tiresome issue of decorum. When she escapes from the palace, one of the first things she will do is to buy a new pair of casual shoes from a market stall. The theme of the split between the public and the private is continued in the following scene, where the princess is being readied for bed. “Why can’t I sleep in pajamas? Just the top half,” she asks plaintively — a request that mildly scandalizes the countess (finely played by Margaret Rawlings) but is a wish that will soon be granted. “Everything we do is so wholesome,” she complains, and when she looks enviously out of her embassy window at the dancing going on in the distance, one senses her dissatisfaction with her royal duties and a longing for a different and freer kind of life. She is treated like a pampered child, with milk and crackers before bedtime. She is allowed to have no opinions of her own, being told what to accept and what not to accept (“Thank you,” “No thank you” she repeats tonelessly, generally expressing the reverse of what she would like) and with prepared speeches to deliver on “Youth and Progress” and “Sweetness and Decency.” In the overall context of the film, it is an important scene because, by the end, we are to see how the character has grown and matured, and become more independent and assertive. Although comically inflected, the theme is not that different from The Heiress: it is about a heroine attempting to free herself from external oppression in order to find her own voice. Audrey Hepburn is charming and funny as her frustration builds, but her shouted delivery of the line “Stop!!!” when the Countess’s litany of meetings and instructions becomes unendurable, really gives one a jolt. It is the cry of a soul in pain and also the unexpected revelation of a forceful actress capable of tragic depths (which Wyler was to release fully with Hepburn in The Children’s Hour). The tears seem to come from genuine distress rather than petulant hysterics, and she has to be subdued with an injection to make her sleep. (In fact, it is the general who will faint at the sight of the needle and the princess, even in her distress, has to stifle a laugh. She has not lost her sense of humor — or mischief.) After everyone has gone, she looks up at the impressive ornamentation on the ceiling and the huge sculpted headboard, but such grandeur only serves to remind her of the lavish, cosseted lifestyle from which she wishes (temporarily, at least) to escape. Changing into a plain white blouse and skirt, she slips past the embassy guards, is momentarily startled by her image in a large mirror (she will later be even more startled when she looks into a mirror after her hair-cut, which gives her a new identity), and then hides in the back of a supply van that takes her through the gates of the Embassy and out into the city. Her adventure has begun. The remainder of the film will be about deception, but equally about transformation: in the heroine’s case, from the buttoned-up Princess Ann to the fun-loving Anna Smith;

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and in Audrey Hepburn’s case, from a promising minor actress in British films to a Hollywood star of the first magnitude. It would be hard to overemphasize the impact of her performance on moviegoers at the time. She seemed to represent femininity and beauty in a quite original and different way. She could be wistful but also funny; delicate and dreamy, but also a sport and a tomboy (as suggested by Irving’s nickname of “Smitty” for her). She was elfin one minute and forceful the next; the essence of gracefulness yet also someone who relishes a good scrap and the opportunity to hit one of the pursuing security men, comically conspicuous in plain clothes, with a handy guitar. She even also looks equally good wearing a tiara or in pajamas. After her escapade at the party and being soaked in the Tiber when making good her escape, she has to borrow one of Joe’s dressing gowns while waiting for her clothes to dry. “Suits you — you should always wear my clothes,” says Joe. “Seems I do,” she replies, wryly but also a little wistfully. There’s a hint of wish as well as wit behind that quip. Billy Wilder summarized Audrey Hepburn’s appeal at the time as pungently as anyone. “After so many drive-in waitresses in movies,” Wilder said, “here is class, somebody who can spell and possibly play the piano.... She’s a wispy, thin little thing, but you’re really in the presence of somebody when you see that girl. Not since Garbo has there been anything like it...” (Shipman: 97). Wilder’s intuition of the girl’s class might come from details such as the fact that she can quote poetry even when half-asleep, and even if that poetry perpetuates her morbid feelings about death felt during her hysterics at the embassy. “If I were dead and buried/And heard your voice/Beneath the sod my heart/Of dust would still rejoice,” she intones, quoting what is apparently a poetic invention of Dalton Trumbo’s own. Admittedly she comes unstuck when she attempts the Romantics, mixing up Keats with Shelley, but by that time, she is sleepier still, and the lines from Shelley’s 1820 poem “Arethusa” that she attempts (“Arethusa rose/From her couch of snow/In the Acroceraunian mountains”) would be a challenge for someone stone-cold sober let alone someone under heavy sedation. Hepburn’s class is also evident in the way she plays suggestive situations — like asking Peck to undress her as if he were a lady-in-waiting — with the lightest of touches so there is not the slightest hint of salaciousness. Her elegance of demeanor is particularly pronounced when she wakes up in Peck’s apartment, first staring at the ceiling and then recognizing with a start that it is quite different from that of her embassy bedroom, whose oppressive opulence had prompted her escape. Her unfamiliar pajamas trigger a similar start of puzzlement and shock. “So I’ve spent the night with you?” she says to Joe. “Oh well, now,” he replies, “I-I don’t know if I’d use those words exactly, but, er ... from a certain angle, yes.” Lovely acting here from both of them. The heroine is shrewd enough to see behind the man’s embarrassment and awkwardness to his fundamental gallantry and decency. There is a moment’s reflection, then her laugh relieves the tension, she extends her hand, and says, in a phrase both oddly formal but decidedly friendly, “How do you do?” When Joe follows her from his flat and “accidentally” meets up with her again, he asks her what she would like to do. “I’d like to do just whatever I like the whole day long!” she replies. (Hepburn’s delivery of that final phrase, a deep-throated gurgle of delight, is inimitable.) “I’d like to sit at a sidewalk café, and look in shop windows; walk in the rain! Have fun, and maybe some excitement. It doesn’t seem much to you, does it?” It is, by inference, a snapshot of how sheltered her life has been so far; and it also sets out the scenario for the remainder of the film, as Joe endeavors to fulfill her dream amidst settings of historical grandeur and romantic glory. Joe’s financial resources are sorely tested when her idea of a casual drink at a café turns out to be a glass of champagne, but fun is provided when he

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drives her around Rome on a little Vespa scooter. This gathers to real excitement and a touch of slapstick when she loses control of the scooter and drives through a painting, a café, and a builder’s work-bench. When they are pulled in by the police, Joe manages to satisfy the officers and pacify the outraged complainants by claiming that he and Ann were traveling on the scooter to their wedding. “You don’t have to look so worried, I won’t hold you to it,” she says afterwards, to which he replies, “Thank you very much.” “You don’t have to be too grateful!” she complains, to which he responds, laughing: “Oh I won’t.” Once again there is an implied wish beneath the wit, as there is in so much of their dialogue, which by now has a poignant undertow. Soon they will visit the wall where each miniplaque represents a wish fulfilled. The princess’s final wish is for a dance on a barge by Saint Angelo. “And at midnight,” she says, “I’ll turn into a pumpkin and drive away in my glass slipper.” “And that’ll be the end of the fairy tale,” says Joe. The story has become in some ways the pursuit of an unattainable dream — for the reporter the once-in-a-lifetime story, for the princess the freedom from royal responsibilities. However, the fulfillment of the dream demands from them both a selfishness that neither of them possesses. Indeed, it is the moment she calls Joe “unselfish” (when they are dancing together on the barge) that one senses Joe’s real discomfort with his role and his realization that he will not be able to carry it through. It is at this point that Wyler’s direction imperceptibly changes gear, transforming the material (not for the first time in his career) into a powerful drama of unspoken, impossible love. Three exemplary scenes stand out. The first is the famous “Mouth of Truth” scene, when the two visit an ancient stone monument and Joe explains that “the legend is that if you’re given to lying, you put your hand in there, it’ll be bitten off.” It is the scene which takes the dual deception to its furthest point, where now (in a humorous way) the deceitful roles the two are playing could lead to retribution. Ann is nervous and, after a tentative jab at the open mouth, pulls back her hand. “Let’s see you do it,” she says to Joe, who looks visibly discomfited. At this point Wyler and Peck collaborated on a piece of comedy business where, after Joe pretends his hand has got stuck, he hides it inside his sleeve and shows the stump to a screaming Ann before revealing the hand and saying, “Hello.” The stunt took Audrey Hepburn by surprise, apparently, and her shock and then delight at the joke (“You beast!”) seem completely spontaneous, which adds to the charm of the moment as she throws herself into his arms in relief. “Hello” is not only a nice anti-climax to the moment but also a fleeting reference to their formal but funny introduction in his flat when they have shaken hands. It is a mark of how far their relationship has traveled since that point. Because we know that both characters are deceivers, Wyler appropriately brings out the suspense as well the humor of the situation through close-ups of their tense faces, so that the explosion of laughter at the end is relief for audiences as well, and endears them to the characters. Structurally, though, the importance of this scene is that it marks a turning point. The masks are beginning to slip, and, as the two grow nearer to each other, the desire to deceive diminishes. Appropriately, then, the last shot of the scene is of the Mouth of Truth itself, staring balefully after the characters, it seems, but asserting its ultimate authority. Truth will out. The scene at the embassy after the princess has returned is also particularly significant because it confirms her transformation. The opening shot, with the princess in the foreground of the frame with her back to the camera and the staff seeming somehow foreshortened and subservient, immediately indicates that a shift in the balance of power has taken place. She is now taking control and they are answerable to her and not the other way around. When the ambassador reminds her of her “duty,” she rebukes him quite sternly,

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trusting that he will never be required to use that word again in her presence. “Were I not completely aware of my duty to my family and my country,” she says, “I would not have come back tonight — or indeed ever again.” Wyler’s emphatic close-up and Hepburn’s voice breaking on that last phrase give maximum impact to the significance of that moment: her high sense of duty but also what it has, and will, cost. She looks down quickly, as if internalizing her anguish. There will be no milk and crackers tonight. The princess has come of age. “You have my permission to withdraw,” she says, a phrase she has used drowsily in Joe’s apartment, much to his amusement, when she is getting ready for bed. There is no sense of amusement here, however. The instruction is delivered with quiet firmness and with the air of someone who has acquired new strength of character. The final scene, as the princess meets members of the press at the embassy, shows Wyler in his element. The pacing is majestic — appropriately enough. The themes of love and duty, the tension between public and private feelings, are brought to a climax, and not a nuance escapes him as the formal words spoken are modified, belied, and contradicted by the alternating close-ups of the princess and Joe. A private unspoken dialogue of love is silent counterpoint to the surface civilities. When the princess has seen Joe and Irving in the press lineup, one senses her panic and uncertainty even as she obediently mouths the platitudes the staff has given her to say. However, when she pronounces her faith in the friendship of nations, Joe chooses his moment to respond: “May I say, speaking from my press service, that your Highness’s faith will not be unjustified.” The statement is at once a covert confession to her of his profession; a recognition of her true identity (“Your Highness”); and a coded reassurance that she has nothing to fear from him in terms of subsequent revelations about the previous day. Her response —“I am so glad to hear you say it”— fulfills the official function of public politeness but also is a private message of which they alone are aware. The moment gives her renewed confidence and a growing sense of independence that the day in Rome has given her. She starts to depart from protocol and the formulaic answers she has been programmed to provide. When asked to say which was her favorite city on her European tour and prompted by the general, she begins to deliver the diplomatic answer, “Each in its own way...,” but then stops suddenly and asserts, “Rome — by all means, Rome”— to the visible consternation of the royal staff but to the delight of the press. She then startles the ambassador (this was clearly not on the schedule) by declaring, “I would now like to meet some of the ladies and gentlemen of the press.” When the countess and the general move forward to accompany her, she stops them with a look. Wyler’s supremacy at this point is shown in the way he refuses to rush the climax, as the princess, equally courteous to everyone as she moves steadily along the line of newsmen and women, draws nearer to Irving and to Joe. When she comes to Irving, he offers her what he calls “commemorative photos of your visit to Rome” and we can just see peeping out of the envelope a wonderful photo of her wielding the guitar as a club to stun her secret service assailant. “Thank you so very much,” she says, in a tone of grave gratitude that would melt a heart of ice. And when Joe formally introduces himself (“Joe Bradley, American News Service”), she simply says, “So happy, Mr. Bradley.” I doubt whether the phrase “So happy,” in Hepburn’s unique intonation, has ever been imbued with a comparable sense of heartbreak. And it is well chosen, too, because it is the first thing Joe had ever heard her say. The phrase will hang ambiguously in the air as the princess, after an unforgettable last look, disappears back into her world, leaving Joe standing alone for a moment before departing, undoubtedly enriched by this brief encounter but reflecting, no doubt, on a lost love. The film might end on the

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word “happy,” but it is not a happy ending — which makes Roman Holiday one of the most unusual of film fairy tales. “Just on the right side of sentimentality and implausibility,” wrote the critic Gordon Gow of the film, “Wyler imparted both humor and a delicate charm” (198). This seems eminently fair. The plausibility was enhanced — certainly in Europe — when the release of the film coincided with the royal romance in England between Princess Margaret and Group Captain Peter Townsend, a relationship that eventually foundered on the princess’s sense of royal duty. (Roman Holiday was said to be Princess Margaret’s favorite film, and Wyler recalled that she seemed insistently to misremember the ending as a happy one.) Plausibility was also no doubt aided when Grace Kelly renounced her soaring film career to become Princess Grace of Monaco. Kelly’s combination of regal grace and adventurousness was seen to its best advantage in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), which Roman Holiday intriguingly anticipates when Joe looks out at the view from his balcony and says to Ann, “I can give you a running commentary on each apartment.” And one would not need to search back very far in recent history for a story of a princess trying precariously to reconcile living a normal life with royal responsibilities and the constant and potentially destructive glare of publicity and the media. As a modern fairy tale, Roman Holiday still resonates. As a romantic comedy, the film is pitched somewhere between Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, and one could hardly ask for better models than that. The film’s plot could have furnished a classic outline for a film of Billy Wilder, with its European setting, innocent heroine, and deceitful American journalist who cannot go through with his deception. Both Wyler and Wilder revered Ernst Lubitsch as the master of sophisticated screen comedy and Roman Holiday has the kind of delicate wit and eroticism that distinguished the work of their mentor. It also has a joke about pajamas that seems a conscious homage to Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938) and which Wilder was to extend ingeniously in his great Italian-set romantic comedy of 1972, Avanti! In his memoir of Lubitsch in the magazine Action, Wilder recalled attending his funeral in 1947 and then walking sadly back to the parking lot with Wyler. “Well,” said Wilder sadly, “no more Lubitsch.” “Worse than that,” replied Wyler, “no more Lubitsch pictures” (14). Roman Holiday was one of those precious comedies that kept the Lubitschian heritage alive.

The Desperate Hours (1955) “Bogie had loved working with Willie again — Willie always made you try harder, go beyond yourself. His and Huston’s methods were different, but they both stretched real actors” — Lauren Bacall, By Myself: 255

In Joseph Hayes’s 1954 novel, The Desperate Hours, there is a moment when the hero spots an opportunity to turn the tables on the three hoodlums who have invaded his home. Two of them are momentarily outside the house, and if his daughter pretends to have a fainting fit in their absence, he senses that the youngest of the gang will go to her aid out of a sense of concern and will consequently be off guard. “As Dan Hilliard reached his decision,” Hayes writes, “it never occurred to him that he was taking advantage not of the evil of these men, but of the one decent impulse he had glimpsed in any of them.” Even if this thought had occurred to him, the author adds that it would have made no difference to Hilliard because at this juncture “he could afford no fine moral distinctions” (67).

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Brothers in crime: Dewey Martin (left) and Humphrey Bogart in The Desperate Hours (1955).

Yet such “fine moral distinctions” are at the heart of Wyler’s 1955 film adaptation of the work, which Hayes had adapted successfully for the stage and now for the screen. This kind of ambivalence might indeed partly explain why it was not as commercially successful as was hoped, for audiences might have felt unsure about where their sympathies were supposed to lie. In the novel, Hilliard refers to the hoodlums as “evil” and the policeman on their trail describes them as “slime” and “scum,” rather overlooking the fact that it is the cop’s own brutality toward one of the gang (breaking his jaw in a retaliatory act against the shooting of another policeman) that explains why they have returned to this district of Indianapolis in search of revenge as well as freedom. Yet Wyler senses two areas of decency in the characterization of these three desperate men: the devotion of the leader, Glenn Griffin to his younger brother, Hal; and Hal’s hopeless attraction to Hilliard’s daughter, Cindy and a lifestyle that he recognizes can never be his. The theme that emerges is somewhat different from the way the film is usually portrayed and actually similar to that of another film of the same year, which might seem quite different in style but that also has the situation of a gang invading an innocent person’s home but becoming progressively disoriented and undermined by the values the home represents, namely, Alexander Mackendrick’s great black comedy, The Ladykillers (1955). The screenwriter William Rose’s lugubrious definition of the basic theme of The Ladykillers is absolutely applicable to the fate of the Griffin brothers in The Desperate Hours: “In the Worst of all Men there is a little bit of Good — that will destroy them” (Mackendrick: 103–4).

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Ostensibly, The Desperate Hours is a 1950s hymn of praise to the resilience of the middle-class American family, as exemplified by the Hilliards, whose cohesiveness as a unit is tested to the limit when they are held hostage by three criminals who have escaped from prison and need a place to hide while awaiting some money from the leader’s female contact. “Magnificence” is the word that comes to the mind of the chief police officer when he ultimately contemplates the way the family has weathered the ordeal. Time magazine (October 10, 1955) applauded the film as a “plain parable about human rights and the majesty of the patriarchal principle,” while, conversely, in Personal Views, Robin Wood attacked the film on more or less the same grounds, as a simplistic vindication of bourgeois values (184). Neither description seems adequate in the light of evidence from the film. One factor that immediately causes some hesitation in accepting a reading of the film as a straightforward clash between good and evil is the casting of the chief roles: Fredric March as the patriarch Hilliard and Humphrey Bogart as the chief hoodlum Griffin. From his early roles onward (notably in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1932 classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), to later characterizations like the spiritually tormented Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (1953) and the devious businessman in Robert Wise’s Executive Suite (1954), Fredric March had specialized in playing seemingly respectable men with a hint of neurosis beneath the normality, and an unexpectedly darker side that could rise to the surface. Indeed, there is a moment in The Desperate Hours when Hilliard threatens to kill Griffin, and the hoodlum, rather amused by the man’s unexpected bravado in a hopeless situation, asks Hilliard’s wife (Martha Scott) if she knew what kind of a man she had married. “No I didn’t,” she says, and the response hangs in the air rather ambiguously. Is she proud at the courage and defiance her husband displays on behalf of the family in such a desperate situation, or is she startled by the revelation of a violent side to her husband’s nature she had never suspected? When Hilliard has the hoodlum at his mercy at the end, he might or might not have the gumption to fire the gun (“You haven’t got it in you,” Griffin says, to which Hilliard replies, “Yes I have — you put it there”), but what he does is every bit as merciless, for, with a relish bordering on the sadistic, he reveals the news of Hal’s death to Griffin, knowing full well (because he has seen it) the depth of feeling Griffin has for his brother. The disclosure is as deadly as a bullet because it takes away Griffin’s wish to live. There is an equal resonance to the casting of Humphrey Bogart as the hoodlum, Glenn Griffin. The man seems to have no redeeming qualities and there is certainly not a shred of sentimentality in Bogart’s richly characterized performance. Indeed, Griffin laughs scornfully at a moment of tenderness shared between the husband and wife, as if contemptuous of such displays of affection. Yet, for the regular filmgoer of that time, Bogart could not help but bring to the character, as March does to his, some substantial part of his screen past. For example, there are echoes of his breakthrough role as the gangster Duke Santee in The Petrified Forest (1936), where he is romanticized as “the last great apostle of rugged individualism” (he has none of the romantic overtones of that here, though it is certainly possible to see his criminality as more dynamic than March’s respectability). There also are the doomed gangsters of Dead End and High Sierra (1941), who are both defeated by society; or the paranoid figures of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and The Caine Mutiny (1954), who evoke pity as well as condemnation in their psychological disintegration. It was Bogart who seemed at the time — and since — to dominate the publicity for the picture and catch the attention of the critics. For me, the most haunting moments of the film all belong to him: the shot of him alone at night in the living room, the camera closing in as he pensively runs a finger along his broken jaw, alerting us to a man in pain and motivated by

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something deeper than money; his rage after the desertion of his brother, which takes the Hilliards by surprise (“What are you gaping at?” he cries after his outburst), and might suggest that his feelings for family, albeit in a warped way, are every bit as strong as theirs; and the last shot of his dead face, which is, with a brusqueness almost shocking, covered by a police blanket, a curt dismissal of a life which has effectively ended in a kind of suicide, since he faces the police marksmen unarmed. The actor’s charisma inevitably infects the characterization. Because Bogart brings so much to the role, one cannot help feeling that there is a lot more going on inside Griffin’s head than simple villainy. How far this was pre-planned or something that emerged in the filming is difficult to determine. Wyler’s first choice for the role of Dan Hilliard had been Spencer Tracy, but apparently the question of billing (Tracy refused to accept anything other than top billing for his role) proved an insuperable obstacle and the role went to Fredric March, a comparably fine actor but with a more unstable screen persona that results in, arguably, a richer, more complex portrayal. Tracy was matchless in conveying rugged integrity and one would have had few qualms about the sturdiness of the man’s resistance. March’s core courage is more brittle, one feels, in terms of his screen persona — and incidentally, this instability might have been enhanced by the fact that March confessed that Wyler as a director frightened him, because his perfectionism was so mysterious and implacable. That sense of fear serves the performance very well, his agitation keeping the audience constantly on edge. Humphrey Bogart actively sought the part of Glenn Griffin, possibly sensing that this might be the last chance he would have to play the kind of role with which he had first made his name (it proved to be his penultimate role). In novel and play, Griffin is a much younger character and was indeed played on stage by a 29-year-old Paul Newman. Although it strains credulity somewhat that Dewey Martin would be Bogart’s younger brother (there is an age gap between the actors of over twenty years), the writer Joseph Hayes did like the fact that, as filmed, Hilliard and Griffin are roughly the same age, but having arrived at completely different destinations. Also, with two such major actors at the forefront of the drama, an extra frisson attaches itself to their scenes of conflict. It is one of Wyler’s starkest confrontations between two separate social worlds: comfort and complacency on the one side and envy and anger on the other, as in Wyler’s Dead End, Wuthering Heights, Carrie, and The Collector. The very title also begins to acquire ambiguous overtones. The desperate hours refer not only to the family; because of Bogart’s magnificent and harrowing performance, it refers also to Griffin, the aging criminal whose dreams of freedom and revenge diminish as the hours tick by. He comes to realize that time for him has run out. It is Dead End revisited, but with the feeling that, unlike Baby Face Martin in that film, Griffin has never had his time in the sun. How well Bogart conveys an almost physical revulsion at March’s executive appearance, topped off by the man’s smartly folded handkerchief in the breast pocket, which at one point Griffin pulls out angrily. In Griffin’s mind, Hilliard is emblematic of the men — from probation officers on up — who have sat in judgment of him all his life. When his brother leaves and Griffin smashes the radio in his rage, he shouts at Hilliard, “Mister he called you!” as if Hal’s deference to Hilliard, who represents everything Griffin despises, is the worst kind of betrayal and hurts him as much as the departure itself. Bogart’s delivery of that line — a growl that carries a charge of wounded anger as well as menace — is one of the acting highlights of the film. This complicating of sympathies is not simply due to the casting but to other strategies in the adaptation, which bring the film into line with Wyler’s characteristic dramatic pref-

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erences and social sympathies. The idealization of the Hilliard family that one finds in the novel and play has been toned down. What we have are scenes of domestic life that are more fractious and realistic. At times, the father has as much difficulty in keeping his family in line as Griffin has with his gang. There is some black comedy at the family’s expense when the tables have been turned. Wyler’s sense of mischief sometimes comes to the fore, as in the moment when the psychopathic Kobish (Robert Middleton) has difficulty getting into the child’s money box and tries to open it if it were a safe. He also is given a broad slapstick routine at the breakfast table when he uncouthly proclaims that he has finished eating by first burping, then wiping his face on the tablecloth, and then departing from the table with the chair still sticking to his backside. There is a fearfully funny moment when Hilliard blunders in with Kobish to find that they have a school visitor who has dropped in because of young Ralph’s absence from school, and he has to account for Kobish’s presence and startled exit by explaining that the man is a shy family friend. He also has to intercept a message from Ralph to the teacher via a school essay that outlines their capture; and he solemnly upbraids the teacher for encouraging such flights of fancy in a manner so overbearing and rude that she flees from the house. Griffin, too, has some fun at the Hilliards’ expense. When he asks Mrs. Hilliard to make a phone call on his behalf and she says, “Whom do you want me to call?,” he chuckles at her grammatical punctiliousness: Even at the point of a gun, middle-class niceties must be observed. When Griffin is being served breakfast (“I always wanted me a servant”), he taps his cup with his spoon as if summoning service from a dilatory waitress. Like Hitchcock, and comparable to the example of Mackendrick’s Ladykillers cited earlier, Wyler knows how a touch of humor can add to a film’s suspense simply by catching an audience off guard or keeping them on edge through a variety of tone as well as incident. The Hilliards are being put through hell, certainly, but their complacency earlier has tended to jar a little. The eruption of these dark underworld forces into their lives undercuts their pomposity and kindles an emotional intensity in the father that his comfortable lifestyle has previously quite clearly suppressed. In a contemporary review in Sight and Sound, Penelope Houston described the film as a “solid, deliberate and long drawn-out exercise in the mechanics of suspense” (Tookey: 182), as if Wyler had approached the material essentially as a genre exercise. He would certainly have wished to make the most of the drama and suspense of the inherent situation: the family at bay in its own home; the danger that the gang represents to them, particularly with one psychotic member who might be impossible to control. There also is the temptation to seek external help (in this regard, Cindy’s boy-friend, played by Gig Young, has a much less active role in the film than in the novel; the family essentially has to deal with this situation themselves). Unknown to the Hilliards, there is a police operation going on outside, as the law tries to track down Griffin’s location by following the movements of his girlfriend (who, curiously, makes no appearance in the film). There is also the time factor, whereby the police are racing against time to find the fugitives’ hideout before they escape. The gang is marking time, waiting for money from Griffin’s contact, and the family is counting the minutes when the men will be out of their house but also fearful that, when that times comes, one of them will be taken as hostage to aid the escape. Wyler negotiates all of this with a sure touch. He makes use of light and shadow when the situation warrants (the shot of Kobish waiting in darkness on the stairs for the return of Cindy from her date is sinister enough to set up the tense situation that follows, as he attempts to search her and Hal comes to her aid). Wyler uses the geography of the house for maximum dramatic purpose,

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as, for example, when an anxious Cindy takes a call from her boyfriend, with Griffin intently watching her every move in the foreground of the frame, while in the background father and mother look on helplessly. The placing of the characters in the frame tells you all you need to know about where the power lies in the household at that particular moment. The crosscutting between different phases of the action is assured, and Wyler skillfully generates emotional involvement through visual means, sometimes in counterpoint to the apparent subject of the scene. Hilliard attempts to deal with his work colleagues and routine in a way that will not arouse suspicion, but the family photos in the office discreetly show where his thoughts really lie. The shots of Hal Griffin’s pleasure in the delicacy of Cindy’s bedroom or as he watches from the window people of his own age enjoying themselves evoke some sympathy for the character and will add to the poignancy of his subsequent fate (he seems more sympathetic than Cindy’s boyfriend). When the film has to open out the action, it does so with some aplomb, notably in the sequence when Kobish chases after the garbage man who has spotted their stolen car, clambering onto the departing truck in order to silence the driver before he can tell anyone what he saw. The fear in this sequence is raw, an ordinary man suddenly confronted by an unhinged individual who is capable of anything. The effect is amplified for the viewer by the casting of the reliable Walter Baldwin in the role of the innocent Mr. Patterson. A Wyler regular, he also played the owner of the café visited by two hired gunmen at the beginning of Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946). In that film he was scared out of his wits but ultimately unharmed. Here he is not so lucky. The thriller ingredients are all there, but the film’s failure at the box office suggests that something did not quite work or that the movie did not deliver what was expected. Wyler wished to make the family convincing, with all-too-typical flaws of human nature, but does an audience warm to them enough to care what happens? Does the film succeed in surmounting some potential problems of plausibility and predictability in relation to the original material? Two structural flaws are apparent. First, the reduction of Griffin’s girlfriend to a barely audible voice on the phone allows no sense of the relationship between the two, or much suspense from her difficulty in getting through. Second, Griffin’s revenge motive against the cop who broke his jaw is underplayed. In the novel, he sticks around for the money so that he can hire a hit man to kill the cop, whereas in the film it is never clear how he will exact revenge if he also has to escape — which in turn makes his reasons for hanging around less credible. Wyler wondered also whether audiences were convinced by the reasons for the Hilliards’ reluctance to go to the police, particularly when they were out in the open. Should he have demonstrated the gang’s violence more strongly in the opening part of the film, so that the family’s fear of what the men might do could be felt more strongly? One problem, perhaps, was simply the timing of the movie’s release. The basic situation was not unfamiliar, and recent films like Lewis Allen’s Suddenly (1954) and Andrew and Virginia Stone’s The Night Holds Terror (1955) also dealt with innocent people held to ransom by murderous criminals. The details might be different, but the source of the suspense was similar. Like a fine film by Wyler’s friend Fred Zinnemann, A Hatful of Rain (1957), which dealt with drug abuse, The Desperate Hours came at the end of a cycle rather than the beginning, and audiences might have felt they had seen this kind of thing once too often. Nevertheless, The Desperate Hours is one of those films where the subtext seems ultimately more interesting than what is on the familiar surface. Part of the novelty of Wyler’s approach was his attempt to make the situation seem more real than melodramatic. The situation of the beleaguered family gains added piquancy because of the way normal everyday life continues to flow all around them: children playing, applicants seeking jobs in the per-

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sonnel office, the chef crying “two burgers, no onions,” oblivious to the drama unfolding elsewhere. Suddenly, the routine of the family’s life seems both desirable and fragile; precious and banal at the same time. Drew Casper has shrewdly compared the film with John Berry’s He Ran All the Way (1951) in the way that both films intriguingly link the mechanics of the thriller family melodrama to the “cultural fear of the stranger,” and the way that both are stories of “prisoners taking refuge in a family held at bay while unleashing locked-away tensions within/between family members” (Casper: 310). Berry was to be one of the victims of the Hollywood blacklist during this McCarthyist era; the atmosphere of those times is certainly felt in The Desperate Hours, not least in the psychological blackmail practiced by the gang and the father’s fear of what might happen to his family if he does not conform and submit to the brutal requirements of the people with the power. Although the situation here could be almost any family’s nightmare, there is an intriguing moment when Hilliard asks, “Why my house?,” to which Griffin responds laconically, “Your break?,” as if to suggest it was just his bad luck. Actually, the explanation goes deeper than that and implicates two of the minor characters, the policeman Jesse Bard (Arthur Kennedy) and the Hilliards’ young son, Ralphie (Richard Eyer). “Your break” seems an unconscious pun on Griffin’s part, because it is his break — his broken jaw — that has brought him back to this area. All the violence we see is a consequence of the policeman’s loss of control when he breaks Griffin’s jaw (with a fist in the novel; with a gun in the film) and leaves him with a scarred face and a mind set on revenge (anticipating one motivator of Michael Corleone in The Godfather [1972]). The policeman himself is quick to pick up the significance of Griffin’s escape, as if expecting the criminal’s instinct for revenge. In that context, it is striking how unsympathetically the police are portrayed, particularly in the way physical intimidation of the kind that injured Griffin seems to be almost a reflex action of the policemen we see. An associate of Griffin’s girlfriend is threatened with violence when he professes not to know where she is (and there is no indication that he does); even Cindy’s male friend, Chuck is similarly threatened when he appears to be withholding information, even though he is surely on the police’s side. Arthur Kennedy’s performance as Jesse Bard sustains an almost consistent note of coiled irritation; and his retaliatory violence against Griffin contrasts with that of the criminal Hal, after he has been bitten on the hand by Cindy in the family’s escape bid — no retaliation follows or is even hinted at. It is another example of the film’s unusual manipulation of sympathies. Yet why that particular house? The key detail is the bicycle left carelessly by young Ralph on the lawn (“Look at that,” one of the gang says, when they are driving through the neighborhood looking for a hiding place.) The bicycle on the lawn means that someone is in the house; also that it is a household with children and thereby easier to intimidate. The role of the child in the film is rather difficult to read. As played by Richard Eyer, the boy is either cute or insufferable, according to taste. What is incontrovertible is that practically every action he takes puts the family in greater danger, so that the father at one stage is driven to talking to him as if Ralphie is one of the gang, exclaiming in total exasperation, “I’ve had just about all I can take from you, young man!” The family’s one chance of expelling the gang from their house is ruined by the boy’s simultaneous attempted rooftop escape, which ends with his falling into the clutches of Griffin. An unlucky chance perhaps, but the boy’s subsequent defiance seems more deluded than heroic. “At least I tried,” he proclaims accusingly to his father. Indeed he did, and if he had succeeded, his entire family would have been shot. The film’s ambivalence toward this supposedly endearing youngster is symptomatic of

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its tone throughout. Even the opening is ambiguous. Gail Kubik’s disturbingly atonal music over the opening-credit shots of suburbia might not be a premonition of the dangers to come; it might be a comment on suburbia itself. (Unfortunately much of Kubik’s score was cut because of the hostility to it of Paramount’s head, Don Hartman, so it is impossible to judge what the cumulative effect would have been; Kubik thought it added an element of edgy unpredictability. Paramount compensated later by publishing Kubik’s concert piece “Scenario for Orchestra,” which was largely made up of the music he had written for the film.) Although the ending might seem a happy resolution, Wyler’s visual presentation is tentative more than triumphant. For the most part the camera keeps a middle distance. The Hilliards re-enter their home, which is now partially wrecked, like their previous comfortable social assumptions. Arthur Kennedy’s policeman swaggers away, seemingly congratulating himself on a job well done, having no qualms about the ruthless gunning down of an unarmed man, and failing to reflect on the consequences of his previous action of retaliatory brutality. The bicycle is still on the lawn, a visual detail that suggests not closure but that this kind of incident could start all over again. Very much a film of and about its time (Michael Cimino’s lurid 1990 remake carries none of its resonance), The Desperate Hours is stylistically more reticent than other films of the period, such as Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life (1956) or the Universal melodramas of Douglas Sirk, but it reflects similar social anxiety and paranoia behind the comfortable façades, the discontents bubbling away under supposedly civilized suburbia. In his Wyler biography, Jan Herman listed the key themes as “psychological blackmail, class conflict and repressed violence” (359). That seems a fair summary of what Wyler saw in the material. The ultimate face-off between the man of violence (Griffin) and the man of peace (Hilliard), whose humane values will be tested to the limit, anticipates the core themes of pacifism and revenge of Wyler’s next three films.

SIX Pacifism and Revenge Friendly Persuasion (1956) “I’m not a pacifist, as you know. So that’s not why I’m interested in this picture. I’m interested in it in spite of that.... But the Quakers honored other people’s ways of thinking and doing. Jess, who thinks fighting’s wrong, lets his son go to war. Eliza, who thinks music is wrong, lets Jess have his organ. This picture says that salvation isn’t a mass product. It says that you save or lose your soul as an individual. When people go out of the cinema after seeing this ... if we succeed ... they aren’t going to say ‘so what.’ They’re going to say ‘That guy had guts. He did what he thought was right’” — William Wyler to Jessamyn West

Based on a series of stories by Jessamyn West about the fortunes of a Quaker family in Indiana in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, Friendly Persuasion was originally optioned by Frank Capra’s short-lived Liberty Films Company (formed with Wyler and George Stevens immediately after World War II) as a starring vehicle for Bing Crosby and Jean Arthur. The production went into abeyance, as did several further attempts, so that when West was approached around ten years later by a young assistant producer named Stuart Millar — later to become an accomplished director in his own right — and said that William Wyler was interested in the book, she was skeptical and did not pay much heed. Indeed, she did not actually know who Wyler was until Millar listed some of his most famous films. She had seen them all and told Millar she thought that they were good pictures. “They were very good pictures,” Millar corrected gently. It is interesting that Wyler should have been drawn to that material at that particular time, for it was a significant moment in his career. Having left Paramount, he was working for a new company, and his next first feature film would be his first in color. Moreover, Friendly Persuasion was the first of three consecutive films (one could see them as a kind of trilogy) in which Wyler would take a long, contemplative look at the dilemma of a basically peaceful hero who is thrown into a violent situation that will test him as never before and compel him to reexamine his pacifist values. All of the films depict an essential goodness in their heroes, which in itself is a dramatic challenge, since goodness can sometimes seem passive and dull if a hero refrains from action rather than being roused to it. Wyler was intrigued by the challenge of engaging an audience’s interest in and sympathy with a hero who, as he put it, “doesn’t punch” or feel the instinctive necessity to defend his name, honor, or manhood through aggressive action. They are all long films by design, for Wyler wants to encourage a thoughtful, considered response to the issues involved. They are also all set 161

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in the past, perhaps to permit the issues to be viewed with a certain distance and objectivity. However, as the critic Gordon Gow said of Friendly Persuasion, “Although set in the past, the meaning was contemporary.” Gow continued (and what he wrote seems equally applicable to the heroes of The Big Country and Ben-Hur), “As head of the family, Gary Cooper voiced the opinion that other means than violence should be found to arrange matters compatibly between the opposing sides ... violence was seen as an inherent flaw in human nature, not to be subdued beneath a show of civilisation” (Gow: 84). Having fought and been injured during World War II while fighting Fascism, Wyler did not personally see pacifism as an option in the face of evil, but he respected the beliefs of people like the Quakers and their faith in the essential decency of human nature. Now with his country in the midst of a Cold War and Hollywood still reeling from the impact of McCarthyism and its endeavor to root out communism (indeed, liberalism) in the film industry, Wyler was passionately concerned with the inner strength of people clinging to their deeply held beliefs in troubled times. For Wyler, good/evil, right/wrong, action/inaction are rarely simple matters: it is one of the reasons why the films are so rich. This complexity can sometimes be felt with added intensity during wartime or in films dealing with the allegiances that war seems to demand. Wyler’s biographer Axel Madsen wrote sensitively about this when he related Wyler’s innate ambivalence to his background: “Born of parents of the same creed but of different nationalities in a borderland with allegiances to rival cultures, he had offered coffee and bread to soldiers in different uniforms when he was twelve...” (317). The family in Friendly Persuasion will do the same. As a text, Friendly Persuasion (or The Friendly Persuasion, to give the book its full title) posed a number of problems for screen adaptation. It covered a large period of time and comprised several discrete episodes in the lives of a Quaker family, the Birdwells, rather than a continuous narrative. The task for the film’s writers was to select, modify, refine, and invent episodes so that they formed a linear and involving story, and to telescope time so that these elements would be dramatic rather than diffuse — hence the film’s choice of a particular period of the American Civil War. The longest story in the collection, “The Battle of Finney’s Ford,” concerns the involvement of the eldest son Joshua (played in the film by Anthony Perkins) and his reasons for fighting. In the book this will be one episode among many that illustrates and tests the principles of the Birdwell family, but it will be the film’s dramatic crux, because the father will also become involved and have to confront the values by which he has lived. How far he can sustain his stance of pacifism in the midst of a war which might claim the life of his son? There is a similarity here between Friendly Persuasion and Mrs. Miniver, where again we see a life of gentleness brutally disrupted by war, and where, in the later film, the father must go through a hitherto unexplored realm of ethical anguish. In discussing this with Wyler, West quoted a remark of the drama critic Kenneth Tynan: “Anyone who arrives at self-knowledge through desperation is the raw material for a great play.” Wyler concurred, and one can feel the force of that formulation behind the film’s final part. Before then, the emphasis is on gentle comedy. The first story in the collection concerns Jess Birdwell’s acquisition of an organ against the wishes of his wife, Eliza (Dorothy McGuire), who believes music violates Quaker principles. The film expands this into two extended humorous episodes. In the first, Eliza’s disapproval of the organ’s being brought into the house leads to her spend the night in the barn, much to the embarrassment of Jess, when his neighbor Sam Morgan (Robert Middleton) unexpectedly calls and guesses the situation. Jess will resolve the situation by actually joining her in the barn (his awkward

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entry being noticed quizzically by his new horse). The incongruity of the situation breaks down Eliza’s defenses. Wyler discreetly implies (and Dimitri Tiomkin’s lovely main theme underlines) that a romantic night ensues. In fact, a compromise is reached and Jess agrees to put the organ in the attic, but this leads to the second comic scene, because, as Jess’s daughter, Mattie (Phyllis Love), and Sam’s soldier son, Gard (Mark Richman), play the instrument in the attic, the Birdwells are unexpectedly visited by a delegation of the Quaker elders, and Jess has somehow to try to cover the sound of the music. He launches uncharacteristically into a voluble sermon; the elders are bewitched by his eloquence and believe any music they might be hearing must be celestially inspired. The humor is further augmented by the fact that this fervent rhetoric is put into the mouth of Gary Cooper, normally the most reticent and monosyllabic of screen heroes. After the elders have gone, Eliza wonders why the music upstairs has stopped, but Jess guesses the situation. Romance is blossoming in the attic, as it had in the barn. In both instances, in an indirect way, music becomes the food of love. Another source of humor is a goose called Samantha, on whom the mother dotes but whom little Jess (Richard Eyer) hates. As he will demonstrate with Old Thunder in The Big Country, Wyler directs animals well (arguably as well as he directs children, in fact) and is particularly good at suggesting in some of them a wicked sense of humor. Samantha is endearing because she puts the precocious child in his place. In one of the stories, Eliza will even go to court to insist on her ownership of Samantha. But, in a significant shift in the film, Eliza’s devotion to the goose will lead her to attack a rebel soldier with a broom when he is about to kill the bird for food, an act of violence that is fundamentally against her principles. It is a moment when the comedy shades into something more serious, and people have either to reexamine their beliefs or face up to flaws in their own character. The other comedic element involving animals concerns Jess’s desire to have a horse that can outpace Sam Jordan’s as they head toward their respective church services on Sunday mornings. (Sam is a Methodist, and the rousing services in the adjoining church are in striking contrast to the quietness of the Quakers.) Sam’s horse, Black Prince, has always beaten Jess’s Red Rover (as Jess says feelingly after one typical Sunday race, “Red Rover, thee gives me a pain”), but when, on one of his business trips, Jess exchanges Red Rover for Lady, a horse owned by the widow Hudspeth (Marjorie Main), Jess knows he is onto a winner. Lady does not look elegant — Sam offers the opinion that she might be half buffalo — but she can move like the wind. These episodes might seem loosely integrated into the main narrative, but they add variety of tone and inject a bit of visual spectacle. The racing horses might be seen as almost a comic variation on, and anticipation of, the chariot race in Ben-Hur! More seriously, though, it is a clever way of suggesting the friendship of Jess and Sam, paradoxically through a rivalry that is rooted in a sense of mischief that seasons their otherwise rather plain existence. This will add particular poignancy to the moment when Jess, looking for his son, finds Sam dying after an ambush by a rebel soldier. Incidentally, the character of Sam Jordan did not appear in the stories. He had been invented for the film because both Wyler and West thought it was important that the hero had a good friend who was not a Quaker and could thus set his beliefs in sharp relief and in a broader context. In To See the Dream, West wrote evocatively of the way the actor Robert Middleton (who had been one of the villains in The Desperate Hours) impressed her at the audition: “The coincidence of this large burly man sitting there, becoming before my eyes Sam Jordan, a man I had made up, was disturbingly magical. It was as if we had both simultaneously had the same thought, even stranger than that, he became my thought” (West:

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194). She was equally impressed by Mark Richman as Jordan’s son, particularly in the scene when he first visits the Birdwells and simply conveys the character of the people he is addressing. When he says, “How do you do, Mr. Birdwell?,” the line might seem functional, but because of the way he says it, West noted, “we saw that Jess was a man whose approval was worth having ... and whose approval you could only get by being a good man yourself ” (ibid: 248). It is the kind of observation that typifies a Wyler film. No detail is too small for careful attention. Jessamyn West had been brought onto the writing team by Wyler to give the film authenticity, and to elaborate on Michael Wilson’s adaptation of the stories, which had formed the core of the original screenplay. She was partnered with Wyler’s brother Robert, who was an experienced screenwriter. It was a harmonious relationship, except that, as is often the case in these kinds of collaborations, both had their pet misgivings about certain scenes. Robert never cared for the early scene with Quigley the organ salesman, which ostensibly is there simply to establish in a humorous way the Quakers’ manner of speech; Robert thought audiences would pick that up anyway. The part of Quigley is expanded a little, perhaps to conceal the functional nature of the character. He will turn up again in the fair scene and also when Jess’s purchase of the organ disturbs Eliza. The part is certainly brought to vigorous life by Walter Catlett. For her part, Jessamyn West disliked one of the remnants of the original script, which was the broadly (indeed bawdily) comic depiction of the daughters of widow Hudspeth, who seem so predatory at the very sight of a young man that Josh starts swiftly doing up his shirt buttons in an instinctive gesture of self-defense. Stuart Millar thought it would become funny in Wyler’s hands, and when West asked why not give him some wit to start with, Millar replied, “Willy likes to do things the hard way.” In the event, both scenes work well enough in the finished film, varying the tone and, in the scenes with the Hudspeth girls, adding a touch of Fordian boisterousness, with Gary Cooper and Marjorie Main joining in the fun, particularly when Jess starts wondering about the fate of the late Mr. Hudspeth, and the two do a mime together to consider the ultimate destination of the dead man’s soul. Nevertheless, such scenes added to the film’s running time, which began to worry the production company, Allied Artists, who thought it would restrict the number of daily showings and hence reduce profits. Wyler agreed to their request to see if he could remove twenty minutes, but when he did, as he later told his friend and fellow director, George Stevens, it seemed to get twenty minutes longer. (Wyler was not being facetious: cutting a film, he recognized, can make it seem longer, because you disrupt the narrative flow that has been established at the script stage, thus making it seem disjointed and episodic.) And one can see, for example, from the early scene of a Quaker service where Wyler invites us to empathize with and respect their silence, that any attempt to force the pace of the film would have been inappropriate to the material. One must accept it at its own tempo, which is that of people who live a quiet and peaceful life. Friendly Persuasion is certainly a friendly film: “charm unlimited” was the phrase used of it by the esteemed critic F. Maurice Speed (Speed: 85). There is any amount of detail to endear us to the characters, from the way Joshua kicks the drawer shut from under little Jess when the boy is getting a bit uppity, to the way Jess adjusts Gard’s sling when the young man comes down from the attic after playing some music with Mattie — a tiny gesture that indicates that Jess knows what Gard might have been doing with his arm when alone with his daughter. In one scene, after an intense confrontation between Joshua and his parents about his fighting in the war, Mattie enters dreamily and almost floats up the stairs with the realization that she loves Gard and he loves her. The counterpoint between the two

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moods is striking and dramatically effective, and reminiscent of a domestic scene in David Lean’s This Happy Breed (1944), when jolly music on the radio is a mocking contrast to the mood of a family that has just learned of the death of their son. In both cases, we have the agony and the ecstasy of life, its joys and sorrows, tellingly placed side by side. Wyler’s compositional sense is to the fore in the scenes of Joshua’s imminent departure for the battle. The stairs dominate one shot, pushing the parents to the background of the frame as they are seated at the table, but indicating where the dramatic focus of the scene lies as we await Joshua’s descent. Eliza wants Jess to intervene, but Jess explains the limits of what he can do. He is only Josh’s father, not his conscience. Wyler and his screenwriters have been careful to keep the war in our consciousness even amidst the gentle comedy. A Quaker service has been interrupted by a limping soldier looking for volunteers, and the enforced slowness of his exit leaves a trail of disquiet, the camera lingering on Joshua, who cannot be sure whether his beliefs are a cover for his fear. Even the fairground scene threatens to erupt into violence when the Quakers’ pacificism is challenged. A pall of smoke, visible in the distance from their house, has indicated the war is coming ever nearer and will inevitably impinge on their values and way of life. As Joshua, Anthony Perkins is particularly good in conveying conflicting emotions in the battle scene — what Jessamyn West called “his struggle to make a soldier of himself, to destroy men, and to destroy what in himself made this destruction hateful to him” (West: 309). James Dean was initially considered for this role, having impressed Wyler hugely in an early audition in much the same way Dean had impressed Fred Zinnemann when auditioning for a role in Oklahoma! (1955). By the time they were ready to come to a decision, however, Dean had become a big star. Perkins had appeared in a small role in George Cukor’s The Actress (1953), but was brought to Wyler’s attention on the strength of his Broadway performance as the sensitive young man in Robert Anderson’s play, Tea and Sympathy. One can see in his fine portrayal of Joshua (for which he gained his one and only Oscar nomination) the prototype of all those anguished and tormented young men he was to portray so sensitively in the future. There is a particularly powerful moment when he wakes from the battle after being knocked unconscious and finds he is still clutching the hand of the rebel soldier he has killed, possibly a deliberate allusion to a famous scene of another great pacifist war film, Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)— produced, one might recall, by Wyler’s uncle, Carl Laemmle — when Lew Ayres’s German soldier dives into a crater and bayonets a French soldier but then, trapped with his victim, finds his terror turning to remorse and a longing for forgiveness. If the story of Joshua in the film is brought to an end when he starts to fire, the story of Jess is brought to an end when he refuses to do so. This is perhaps the main difference between film and book. In the book, the hero is never brought to this point. Indeed, the character of the wife seems equally important. Originally, Wyler had thought of Katharine Hepburn (who was unavailable) and Ingrid Bergman (who was still under a cloud in Hollywood because of her affair with the great Italian director, Roberto Rossellini) for the role of Eliza. The eventual choice, Dorothy McGuire, is a fine actress, but her putupon screen persona does not carry the charisma of the character in the way that Hepburn and Bergman might have done, and she therefore cedes center stage to Jess. That in turn brings the dramatic dilemma at the heart of the film into sharp focus. At the very first meeting between Stuart Millar and Jessamyn West, Millar put his finger on the central issue of the adaptation: “In your story of Jess, a Quaker who doesn’t believe in fighting,” he said, “you never confront him with the need of fighting” (West: 33). The casting

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of Gary Cooper (no one else seems to have been considered for the role) made this issue inescapable. Cooper is ideally cast. He embodies exactly the kind of quiet determination, unwavering integrity, and adherence to principle the part required, with a bit of quirky obstinacy thrown in for good measure. Indeed, the original title envisaged for the film (later abandoned, fortunately) was Mr. Birdwell Goes to Battle, as if intending to remind audiences, and particularly Cooper fans, of one of his definitive successes, Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). Nevertheless, the inevitability of the casting brought to a head one of the central challenges of the script. As Cooper told Jessamyn West at their first meeting, the fans that go to see a Gary Cooper movie expect the hero to do something. When West replied, “You’ll do something — refrain,” Cooper pointed out this was difficult to film. What was needed was an event that would, in Stuart Millar’s phrase, carry the hero “through hell and high water.” Jess is tested when Joshua’s riderless horse returns home and Jess believes his son has been killed in battle. Wyler’s friend, John Huston, who had read the screenplay with great admiration, worried about the moment when Jess takes the rifle, because he felt that the act undermined everything we had been led to believe about the hero and what he had stood for. But for West, this was essentially the point. We in the audience must also feel that Jess should not take that gun, otherwise the whole build-up to that point has been wrong. “Jess is a good man, but a man with a flaw,” West told Wyler. “He must be tempted to violence ... and he must have the means of killing in his hand at the moment of his temptation. And we must see him decide, in spite of the provocation and in spite of the means, to refrain. Even though the refraining may lose him his life” (ibid: 266). This situation is to recur in both The Big Country and Ben-Hur, making clear that sophisticated dramaturgy is required to convey pacificism as an active, not passive, quality. While searching for his son, Jess comes across the wounded body of his best friend, Sam, who has been ambushed and who dies in front of him. A shot rings out and Jess collapses, stunned by a bullet that has grazed his forehead. A young rebel soldier emerges and is about to steal Jess’s horse when Jess runs toward him. Panicked, the soldier attempts to reload his gun, but Jess reaches him before he can do so. All the impetus of anger — the fear for his son’s life, the killing of his friend, the threat to his own life — drives him on in the struggle against the enemy soldier, whom he now overpowers. And it is at this point that the essence of the man surfaces, as he says to the uncomprehending, frightened youth, “I’ll not harm thee [my emphasis],” and drops the rifle to the ground. Powerfully acted by Cooper, it is the most moving moment in the film, where the very last word he says — the “thee” that has been the subject of that comic conversation early in the film with the organ salesman — both explains his action and reclaims the essence of his identity. As Jan Herman was to note, Friendly Persuasion was to have a rather strange afterlife (Herman: 378–9). It was politely rather than fulsomely received by the critics and was only a modest financial success (the popularity of the Dimitri Tiomkin-Ned Washington title song, recorded by Pat Boone, undoubtedly helped). Friendly Persuasion was nominated for six Oscars (best film, direction, supporting actor, adapted screenplay, song, and sound) but won none. Indeed, when the Writers Guild ruled that Michael Wilson was entitled to the sole writing credit, but did not have to be credited because he was blacklisted, the studio, fearing a backlash from the conservative American Legion, issued the film with no screenplay credit at all. Wyler was indignant, feeling that Wilson, Jessamyn West, and his brother, Robert, should have shared the writing credit, which could possibly have won them an Oscar. That this still rankled with Wyler years after the film’s release is indicated by a letter

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he wrote to the Los Angeles Times (April 16, 1979) in response to their obituary for the screenwriter Michael Wilson, in which they stated Wyler had objected to Wilson’s credit as the film’s principal screenwriter. The letter is worth quoting in some detail: The fact is that I only objected that Wilson be acknowledged as the film’s only screenwriter. Friendly Persuasion was written for another producer-director years before I undertook to make the film. Subsequently two other writers, namely Jessamyn West (the author of the original stories) and Robert Wyler together re-wrote parts of Wilson’s screenplay, contributing significantly to the final picture and I felt their work should be acknowledged as well as Wilson’s. So I proposed that all three names receive credit for the screenplay with Wilson’s name in first place, thereby recognizing him as the “principal” screenwriter. When the Writers’ Guild awarded Wilson exclusive solo credit, then the film’s financiers and distributors Allied Artists Corporation decided to release the film with no screenplay credit whatsoever, a decision I regretted but had no control over. This correction should in no way minimize or detract from my high esteem of Michael Wilson, both as writer and citizen.

The wrangling is another reminder of the troubled times in which the film appeared and the relevance of its themes of tolerance, comradeship, and a love of peace at a time of Cold War. The film won the Golden Palm Award at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival, ahead of mighty rivals such as Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal. Reynold Humphries has suggested that the award was given more for political than aesthetic reasons, and out of sympathy for Wilson’s predicament (Humphries: 158). He suggests this was to avoid the embarrassment of the previous year, when an Oscar for The Brave One had been given to the screenwriter Robert Rich, who turned out to be the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo. In fact, the irony (or absurdity) is even keener than that, because these two things happened in the same year: that is, while Wilson was being denied an Oscar consideration because of his political affiliations, Trumbo was inadvertently being rewarded despite his politics. The political temperature over the film was raised again as late as 1988, when that archest of conservatives, President Ronald Reagan, gave a tape of Friendly Persuasion to Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and praised the film for its “sweep, majesty, and pathos” and for the way it showed “not just the tragedy of war, but the problems of pacifism, the nobility of patriotism and the love of peace” (Herman: 389). Wyler, who loathed Reagan’s politics, would have been turning in his grave, and Wilson’s supporters were not slow to point out the hypocrisy of Reagan’s endorsement of a film whose principal writer had been one of the most conspicuous victims of a blacklist that Reagan had zealously supported. The final irony, perhaps, is that the author of the original stories, Jessamyn West, was a cousin of Richard Nixon, one of the most potent political symbols of McCarthyist zeal (though in a letter of congratulation to Wyler on his Life Achievement Award [March 17, 1976], she did wittily apologize for that family connection). In retrospect, the political heat generated by Friendly Persuasion seems rather out of proportion to its intentions. Louis D. Giannetti’s description of it as “warm, sentimental, and decent” seems a just assessment (Giannetti: 220).

The Big Country (1958) “We saw The Big Country again the other day. It seemed if anything even better than when we all saw it together and is certainly the shortest three hours I’ve ever spent in a cinema” — Christopher Fry, in a letter to the Wylers, April 24, 1959

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Discussing myth and reality in his book, Towards a Sociolog y of the Cinema, I. C. Jarvie makes a brief reference to what he calls “the magnificence and high spirits of Wyler’s seriously underrated The Big Country” (157). The comment might be fleeting, but it is tremendously refreshing. The Big Country certainly is magnificent. Shot largely on location on the Stockton ranch in California and the Mojave Desert in Arizona, it has a Technicolor and Technirama visual grandeur that is often breathtaking. Few films have been launched so spectacularly. Saul Bass’s title design is a resplendent montage of stagecoach, thundering horses’ hooves, and vast open landscapes; and Jerome Moross’s majestic main theme seems (and has become) the musical apotheosis of the American West. The film’s “high spirits” is not a quality many critics have picked up, though it is apparent to anyone who has seen it with a large audience. This is one of the funniest of Westerns, both visually (the film is packed with both broad and sophisticated comic business) and verbally (where every major character has an individual sense of humor, not always appreciated by the others, and where, one feels, the hero and heroine fall in love almost subconsciously through their ability to share a joke). If anyone doubts Wyler’s facility with comedy, just study the moment when McKay’s greeting of “Good morning” to the cowboys is met by the more authentic “Howdy,” but when he tries saying “Howdy” to a passing cowboy, he is met by a cheery “Good morning!” The verbal and visual timing of that is worthy of Chaplin. As for the film’s being “seriously underrated,” that has indeed remained the case. The Big Country has tended to be placed rather patronizingly (though Wyler would probably have been flattered) alongside so-called “liberal” westerns like Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) or George Stevens’s Shane (1953), which tend to be derided as being self-consciously arty westerns for people who don’t like the genre. They are both very fine films, but Wyler’s is distinctively different from both. The contemporary work it most resembles is, arguably, Leonard Bernstein’s musical operetta Candide (1957), which was also seriously underrated on first appearance. It is also an ironic epic about intolerance and prejudice, and a period piece that nevertheless alludes pointedly to the McCarthyist era in which the work was created. And it is a tale told with humor and panache, before gradually, in the grandeur of its conception and seriousness of purpose, becoming extremely moving. The reason that The Big Country has rarely had the recognition it deserves is perhaps that its originality has either been missed or rejected as generically unacceptable. In its running time of over 160 minutes, it dares to sidestep almost every western convention. The only stagecoach it shows deposits an unlikely hero from Baltimore, whose stylish luggage provokes bewilderment and whose bowler hat prompts derision. There are no Indian massacres, the only allusion to such an event being a game of horror stories exchanged between Jim McKay (Gregory Peck) and the schoolteacher Julie Maragon ( Jean Simmons), during which the hero dares to feign unmanly squeamishness by pretending to faint. The fights or gun duels we see all end either inconclusively or in mutual destruction. Above all, Jim McKay is a most unusual Western hero, a dude from back East who

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never looks like a cowboy at any stage and who, in his resolute refusal to conform to the expectations of his new community, dares to be exasperating rather than exciting. In genre terms, he is a spoilsport, constantly undermining the cowboy instinct for action, confrontation, and violence by questioning the need for it. Gregory Peck’s persona of stolid nobility (which misses pomposity by a hair’s breadth) has rarely been used more shrewdly, largely by exploiting Peck’s gift for self-mocking humor. McKay turns down the challenge to ride the untamed horse Old Thunder because he knows he has been set up for a fall (literally) and refuses to play along. “Some other time,” he tells the ranch’s foreman, Steve Leech (Charlton Heston), and he means precisely that, for he will choose the time himself when, away from witnesses, he attempts to ride the horse. At the cost of losing face and being thought a coward (by his fiancée, among others), he refuses to take up Leech’s challenge of a fight when the latter calls him a liar. “I’m not playing this game on your terms,” he tells him, and it is the last phrase that is significant, McKay resisting the pressure to conform to the will and compulsion of others. As in the Old Thunder incident, he decides himself when is the right time, place, and occasion. He fights Leech eventually, to prove a point and to prove its pointlessness. At the back of all this is his painful memory of a deeply loved father who was killed in a duel over a quarrel, the cause of which no one can remember. By inviting us to think about and delight in McKay’s unconventional (even un–American) behavior, Wyler simultaneously forces us to reconsider the ideology of masculinity against which McKay is reacting, as well as the impulse and pressure to act big in a big country. When quizzed about his attitude to the West at his engagement party —“Have you ever seen anything so big?”— McKay replies, with disarming candor, “Well, yes. A couple of oceans.” So here is another Wyler film whose title will prove to be somewhat ironic. Countless westerns will build to a final showdown between two men, but only in The Big Country is the climax a showdown between two secondary characters, which ends in a destructive stalemate. Even the later, revisionist westerns of a Leone or an Eastwood do not upturn conventions with the drollery or intelligence of Wyler here, who gives us not only a film of action but also a film of ideas, often both at the same time. Writing of the director’s use of long shot during the protracted fistfight between McKay and Leech, Axel Madsen aptly described the scene as “an example of the camera expressing an action by the choice of set-up” (331). Stuart Millar had made a similar observation to Jessamyn West during the preparation of Friendly Persuasion when he told her that Wyler was famous for “getting depth in action — the movement, and the significance of the movement” (West: 139). The fight between the two men is a definitive example of that: how it is shown is inseparable from what it means. They are tiny figures in darkness set against a vast landscape. The camera placement deflates the earnestness of the struggle, cuts the men down to size, and makes a visual comedy out of their loss of proportion. “Tell me, Leech,” says McKay after this prolonged encounter, “what did we prove?” The film’s tone is ironic and urbane. It approaches the characters and the society from an outsider’s perspective, in the process “debunking” (Wyler’s word) the genre and its obsession with a particular brand of muscular heroism. Nearly all the main characters have things to say about their perception of the hero’s “manliness,” from Buck Hannassey’s “He ain’t much of a man,” through the major’s “I don’t understand this man” to Ramon’s “A man like him — very rare.” The concept of masculinity is intriguingly set against the notion of a “gentleman,” a word the film keeps returning to and a theme as insistent here as in, say, David Lean’s 1946 classic adaptation of Dickens, Great Expectations. (Rufus Hannassey uses the word “gentleman” no fewer than three times in his denunciation of his arch enemy,

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Henry Terrill, at the Terrills’ engagement party.) This subtext seems to offer another possibility of westerner, that is, someone who can be heroic, and recognized as such, in a different, non-violent way. Amidst these central concerns are other important themes, too: fathers and children, which connect nearly all the main characters and have complicated overtones of possessiveness, oppressive patriarchy, and even hatred; the familiar Wyler theme of unrequited love, which not only involves Buck Hannassey’s desire for Julie but also Steve Leech’s for Pat, expressed as frustrated emotions that drive both men to assault the object of desire. There is the even more characteristic theme — but an unconventional one for a Western — of social class, where the haves and the have-nots are locked in deadly enmity. The confrontation scene at the party between Rufus Hannassey (Burl Ives) and Henry Terrill (Charles Bickford) is not in the original novel but is at the core of Wyler’s film, and is perhaps the film’s most characteristic scene, the one with Wyler’s fingerprints all over it. In his Films and Filming review, Peter Baker went so far as to claim that The Big Country is “an allegory, with Major Terrill as a Fascist dictator and Hannassey running his less prosperous community like a Communist dictator” (23). It is a startling but nevertheless plausible assertion (particularly as we never learn of any personal reason for the deep hatred between the two old men), which implicitly suggests how Wyler might have seen the material as having contemporary relevance to a Cold War America and a world becoming dangerously polarized between two hostile ideologies. One might propose, in fact, that the film allegorizes one of the central political concerns of the twentieth century, namely, the ideals of liberal democracy contending for supremacy against the powerful extremes of authoritarianism on either side of the political divide. Philip French referred to the film rather disdainfully as “William Wyler’s United Nations’ hymn to peaceful co-existence” (French: 43), but the greatness of The Big Country resides precisely in the ambitiousness of its theme and the relaxed complexity of the conception and execution. If the film’s hero seems unusually unassertive, it is equally true that there are no real villains. (Even Old Thunder is more mischievous than malicious, feigning docility when McKay first mounts him before rearing into action, and snuffling over him in mock commiseration after throwing him for the umpteenth time.) There are seven strong characters in the film, all of them convincingly motivated and with reasons for behaving the way they do. All of them, in Peter Baker’s words, “carry their share of the drama” (23), which gives the narrative an uncommon balance and density. Even Buck Hannassey, who is simply a sadistic thug in the novel, becomes a three-dimensional figure in the film, and Chuck Connors’s skillfully shaded performance gets behind the uncouthness and bravado to reveal someone sensitive about slights to his character and resentful of his father’s strict disapproval. When scrutinized closely, his behavior is no more reprehensible than that of Steve Leech or Major Terrill. Underlying the whole film is a message about the futility of violence as a solution to a society’s problems. At no stage are we invited to enjoy the violence vicariously; it is always undercut or submitted to a judgment. If this disappoints genre expectations — and it clearly did — then all the more credit to the film, for the point it was making had struck home. When former ship’s captain Jim McKay first arrives in San Rafael to meet his future bride, Pat Terrill (Caroll Baker), daughter of one of the wealthiest ranch owners in the country, he could scarcely appear more at odds with his surroundings. He is smartly tailored and clean shaven, in striking contrast to the unkempt, hard-bitten cowboys who survey his appearance with some incredulity (one of them even spits in the street to express his con-

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tempt). Topping it all off is his hat, which prompts hilarity among the boys watching, and attracts Steve Leech’s attention when he rides up in a buggy to take Jim to meet Pat. Advising him not to wear the hat, he says, “Some cowboy might take it into his head to shoot it off you” (that cowboy subsequently turning out to be Buck Hannassey). In a sly reference to the opening of Mrs. Miniver perhaps (or even to the recurrent hat motif in films made by his good friend Billy Wilder), Wyler is to have a lot of fun with hats during the course of the film. In Charlton Heston’s magnificent performance, the character of Steve Leech often uses his hat as a sort of barometer of mood, pulling it tightly and testily over his head when he sees McKay in the morning or when responding to Pat’s near-hysterical accusation that he has not tried to find him when McKay goes missing; or slapping it angrily over his chaps when he challenges McKay to a fight and, later, when he defies Major Terrill. Rufus Hannassey asks his son Buck to remove his hat out of politeness when he suggests to Julie that she might like to marry his boy, only to throw it back in his face when he sees Julie’s distaste and realizes Buck has lied to him about their mutual attraction. McKay’s bowler hat has a relatively small role, but it is a significant one. It is not only a mark of his difference but also of his defiance, for he takes no notice of Leech’s advice. The bowler also offers an oblique foretaste of subsequent strife between McKay and Pat, when she takes a goodhumored but rather ominous exception to his appearance: “Well, quite honestly, darling, you do look a bit funny out here with those clothes.” Finally, though, the hat will symbolize McKay’s ultimate progress. The Hannassey boys take pot shots at it, but they miss. The hat might seem too suave for its surroundings but it proves indomitable — like its owner. “Maybe it’s a better hat than I thought,” says McKay. Other people will come to the same conclusion about him. McKay and Pat’s encounter on the road with the Hannasseys is evidence of the film’s ebullience, subtle variety of tone, and complexity of sympathies. The Hannasseys have been drinking, and when Buck spots McKay and Pat’s buggy in the distance as they ride back to her father’s ranch (one of the film’s many majestic compositions in depth that testify to Wyler’s visual flair), Buck suggests to his brothers that they give the dude a proper “welcoming.” At this stage the tone is lightly humorous, with some enjoyable slapstick involving one of the brothers who has been asleep and is subsequently one step behind the others, and has trouble donning his boots and climbing on his horse. When McKay notices men on the road he is inclined to slow down, but when Pat recognizes the Hannasseys (“Local trash,” she says, ‘“keep riding”), she whips the horses into a gallop. A chase ensues, and the element of fun is momentarily sustained through the circus-style horsemanship of one of the Hannasseys and through the sheer exhilaration and rhythmic drive of Jerome Moross’s music. The mood changes when the buggy is brought to a halt and the Hannasseys surround the couple. Buck is jokily deferential towards McKay’s gentlemanly appearance and instructs one of his brothers to doff his hat in mock respect. “Miss Terrill,” he says, “ain’t you gonna introduce me to your Intended?” Pat replies — and Carroll Baker brings real venom to the line —“I wouldn’t introduce you to a dog.” The close-up of Buck’s flushed reaction shows that the insult has really stung. However, McKay shows that he is not prepared to accept Pat’s (or anyone’s) judgment at immediate face value and interjects, quietly: “The name’s McKay.” It is a mark of his politeness, but the phrase is to become something of a recurrent refrain, a way of emphasizing that he is his own man. The trouble that follows mirrors the film’s overall structure, where a small action leads to a reaction, which then prompts a further retaliation, and so it goes, stage by stage, until a wholesale conflict is raging. The film is masterfully constructed this way; it is the way

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wars begin. Buck has seized McKay’s hat and thrown it into the air to take shots at it. Pat grabs a rifle from the buckboard in an attempt to halt the revelry. McKay tries to take it off her, at which point he is lassooed, yanked from the buggy, and forced to submit to a hazing from the Hannasseys while Pat looks on helplessly. (Incidentally, Peck and Wyler had a big falling-out over this scene, when Peck, as co-producer, wanted one moment reshot because he thought his character looked foolish, and Wyler refused. The offending shot was cut from the film anyway.) The Hannasseys’ behavior is boisterous more than threatening, which is a calculated departure from the novel, where McKay is clubbed over the head by Buck’s revolver. The difference is in keeping with the broadly humorous tone of the opening, but it also emphasizes the overreaction of Major Terrill and his men when they use this incident as justification to raid the Hannasseys’ home in Blanco Canyon, and for beating up three of the Hannassey boys later in town. Terrill insists to McKay that it is the proper response for such an outrage perpetrated against a guest at his house. But McKay tells him, pointedly, “You’re riding on the Hannasseys for reasons of your own, not because of anything that happened to me.” Terrill’s earlier, intemperate outburst of hatred against the Hannasseys at the breakfast table had taken McKay by surprise. This argument with the major on the porch — and in front of Pat and all the major’s men — is the first big moment of conflict in the film. Wyler’s staging crystallizes the sudden division of minds and characters who literally cannot see eye to eye: McKay on the porch looking down, the major on the ground turning back to glare at a future son-in-law who not only seems unaccustomed to the ways of the West but dares to publicly question his authority and even his honesty. This strong difference of opinion between the two will hang over the beginning of the party that takes place that same evening, and which is the big set-piece of Part One of the film (when The Big Country was first shown, there was a short intermission between Parts One and Two). It is arguably the most elaborate set-piece in Wyler since the ball in Jezebel, and for me is one of the best sequences Wyler ever directed, for it brings out all his strengths: the unobtrusive visual craftsmanship, the excellence of performance, the subtlety and solidity of his dramatic structures, and his unerring control of tempo and tension as he cumulatively builds toward an eruption of social confrontation and conflict. It is the moment when the polite civility of Major Terrill’s lavish social gathering to celebrate his daughter’s engagement is interrupted by the appearance of Rufus Hannassey. Initially we see Major Terrill and McKay greeting guests at the door. During a lull in proceedings, the major loses no time in trying to smooth over the differences between them and ensure that nothing overshadows his daughter’s celebrations. “Well, Jim, what happened this morning?” he says. “I understand your feelings perfectly. I dislike violence as much as you do. Believe me, I’ve tried talking to the Hannasseys and it just doesn’t work.” When McKay tries to interject, the major continues, “Please, Jim, no more. Let’s close the book on it.” McKay does not seem entirely satisfied (even before he learns what has happened that afternoon), so the undercurrent of unease is not banished, though it is temporarily put aside when Julie arrives and the mood lightens. She engages in good-natured banter with the major over his attempt to buy the Big Muddy from her, which was owned by her grandfather and which provides the main water supply for the cattle of both the Terrills and the Hannasseys. Although the tone is lighthearted, Julie knows that if ever the Big Muddy were to fall into the hands of either family, open warfare on the range would result. This is the first strong hint of the conflict that drives the later narrative. There is a telling touch when Julie inquires after Pat and, on being told she is getting ready,

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remarks, “She’s waiting until everyone’s here so that she can make a grand entrance.” The tone is entirely without malice and yet the observation is absolutely accurate, confirming Julie as a shrewd judge of character (when McKay tells Pat that everyone is waiting, she says, “Just as I planned”). It might seem a small detail but it is a significant one in that Pat’s calculation of a “grand entrance” is the absolute antithesis of McKay’s hatred of show and his belief in private, individual integrity. When Pat asked him what he has been doing during the afternoon he attempted to ride Old Thunder, he replies, obliquely and ironically, “Oh ... getting the feel of the land.” It is one of those moments that most defines the character and an audience’s attitude toward him: a private joke shared between him and us but from which Pat is excluded. In their final scene together, Pat will allude to this: “Even when you rode Old Thunder, everybody knew it — Ramon knew it, Julie knew it, but me, not a word.” “A man has to prove himself to himself, not to anyone else,” he replies. When she asks, “Even to the woman he loves?,” he says, “Least of all to her, if she loves him.” Pat does not understand this ( Julie does), and that unbridgeable incompatibility of outlook will eventually prove the death-knell of their relationship. Typical of Wyler, both characters have a point. For a while, harmony reigns at the party. Pat calls out as she and McKay make their appearance on the stairs and, while the guests applaud, the major moves toward them and then stands between them on the step above to make his speech of congratulation. This triangular composition has a symmetry and solidarity that unobtrusively marks the moment that will prove to be the high-water mark of the relationship between McKay and the major. Indeed, it suggests the same between him and Pat. From here on, things will begin to deteriorate. When Pat calls out, we also glimpse Steve Leech for the first time in the scene to add another undercurrent of tension. There has already been a hint of his own attraction to Pat, and her discomfort in his presence, conveyed in a single gesture (Pat closing the top of her morning robe when Leech appears at breakfast). The major’s speech shows his mastery of the big occasion. In a way, it is a forerunner of a much more serious situation later in the film, when he faces a mutiny of his men at Blanco Canyon. Wyler cuts away from this trio just once during the speech to show Leech looking uncomfortable and ill at ease. The contrast between him and McKay is striking, and the hint of sexual jealousy is heightened by the contrast of masculinity — refinement against ruggedness. In the novel, Pat and Leech have an affair that borders on sado-masochism, but the film shows no interest in that. The issues here will concern masculinity and character. The dancing starts. McKay and Pat dance alone for a moment before others join in. Wyler and his writers contrive three very sharp vignettes as the couples change partners. Steve requests a dance with Pat, which becomes an awkward, self-conscious interlude where the two never look at each other. Pat’s emotional unease is reflected in her physical discomfort (“You’re hurting my hand, Steve”). Jim interrupts the major to start dancing with Julie, and they share just two lines that are nevertheless redolent with meaning and very revealing about their characters. “How do you like the major?” Julie asks, to which McKay replies: “I’m not marrying the major.” Very astute of Julie to focus instantly on the importance of this relationship to any prospect of McKay’s successful union with Pat; and very typical of McKay to counter with an assertion of his own individuality and an implied criticism, as if he is not as taken in by the major as everyone else seems to be. The exchange is given an added piquancy because it is followed by a tender moment between Pat and her father, when she expresses her fears about the future. “What would I do if he decided not to settle here?” she says. “I don’t think I could bear to be away from you.” Pat’s devotion to her

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father might explain her attraction to an older man like McKay, but it will eventually be the difference between McKay and a man like her father that will destroy their relationship. For now, the major takes her hand gently and says, “Don’t worry, my dear, I’ll make a Terrill of him yet.” In that sense, then, contrary to McKay’s assertion, he would be marrying the major, to the extent of taking his name. But, as he has said earlier, “The name’s McKay.” It is at this perfectly prepared juncture that Hannassey enters, an appearance that will drive McKay and the major as far apart at the end of the party as they were at the beginning, and forever prevents the prospect of the major’s making a Terrill of McKay. The first presentiment we have of Hannassey’s entrance is a shot of a man with his back to the camera staring in at the party through the French windows — a new glowering presence about to make itself felt. He moves forward into the main body of the house and stands watching the proceedings. He carries a rifle and his well-worn rancher’s clothes are in stark contrast to the elegance and affluence around him. Wyler cuts to a shot of him in profile, dominating the frame, while in the background McKay leans toward Julie, clearly to ask who the man is. As awareness of Hannassey’s menacing entrance filters around the room, the dancing stops and the music falters to a halt. The major moves forward, with Steve Leech in loyal support. Incongruous at the dance, Leech is suddenly active and necessary. On the two occasions in the scene when Hannassey makes a threatening movement and the major might be in physical danger, Leech’s instinct is to protect him. The major has to check him both times. It is a small detail but one that emphasizes Leech’s loyalty at this stage, in contrast to the gulf that will widen in the story’s second half, when he is driven to open defiance. Hannassey’s entrance is probably the most highly charged introduction to any character in a Wyler film, and Burl Ives seizes the opportunity to deliver a tour-de-force of hatred. Hannassey is at first ironic and sarcastic, contrasting the implied elegance and civilization behind the finery of Terrill’s house and clothes with the brutal behavior of Terrill’s men when twenty of them, under his orders, beat up three of Hannassey’s boys in retaliation for the incident with McKay the previous day. The tone changes to one of rage and Wyler cuts to a close-up of Hannassey’s contorted face as he rounds on Terrill for invading his home in Blanco Canyon, smashing property, and frightening the women and children. (Even Leech has bridled slightly when the men started shooting into the water tank. “Do you want that, major?” he asked, to which the major replies, “Let them have their fun.”) This exposes not simply the major’s cruelty but his hypocrisy. Reaction shots during the speech are very pointed: The major seems smolderingly impassive, thumbs in his lapels, refusing to give ground. Julie appears uncomfortable and embarrassed when Hannassey mentions his admiration for a “genuine gentleman” like her grandfather; he goes on to express his disappointment at seeing her under the same roof as the Terrills. McKay is clearly dismayed on hearing what has been enacted in his name and against his wishes. When Hannassey tosses his rifle to the floor and challenges Terrill to use it on him before turning his back and exiting, Wyler’s framing of the characters as they watch him depart catches precisely where they stand emotionally as well as physically as a result of that speech: the major, Pat, and Leech form in a united line of resistance; in a different line behind them and at a slight remove from their united front, McKay and Julie. The gradual diminuendo of tension toward the end of the scene is handled with a sureness of behavioral and physical detail that marks out Wyler yet again as one of the great dramatic craftsman of Hollywood cinema. It is akin to a quiet coda that follows a moment of high drama in a symphony. “Well, he certainly said a beardful,” says the major, defusing the tension of the situation in a way that

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involves no loss of face. Pat laughs and looks around at the guests as if encouraging them to share her admiration of how little the incident has affected her father’s composure. “If there’s one thing I admire more than a devoted friend, it’s a dedicated enemy,” he goes on, which is a dignified sentiment more for the benefit of his guests, one feels, than a statement of fact. It is Leech, perpetually mopping up after the major and doing his dirty work for him, who is left to stoop and pick up Hannassey’s rifle. The major does not even deign to look at it, as if it were beneath his consideration. “But I apologize for this interruption. Mr. Hannassey’s bad manners,” says the major, adding rather ominously, “I promise you it will never happen again.” He calls for the music to resume and then wanders to McKay and says, “Now you see why it’s dog eat dog.” In reply, McKay says nothing but looks at the major very, very hard. It is a look that Peck had practiced in a previous western, Henry King’s The Bravados (1958), and of which he was now a master: disdain, disapproval, and distrust in simultaneous operation. The major wanders off to his room, followed by Leech, rifle in hand, presumably to plan the next stage of their operation against the Hannasseys. “We’re civilized now,” McKay had been told by one of the guests at the beginning of the scene. At the end, the most prominent object is Hannassey’s rifle, which portends future violence. The fallout from the events at the party will be momentous. The following day McKay rides out on a secret mission to buy the Big Muddy in an action that was first intended as a surprise wedding present but, in the light of events, now looks more like a peace-keeping mission. It will have unforeseen consequences. Because the loyal but simpleminded ranch hand Ramon (Alfonso Bedoya, endearing in his final screen role and in complete contrast to his memorably villainous performance as Gold Hat in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) fails to communicate McKay’s message of reassurance to Pat, the assumption is that he has gone riding and got lost. A massive manhunt ensues. A distraught Pat has not only to contend with anxiety about her fiancé but also about resisting the sarcasm and physical advances of Steve Leech. Small wonder that, after he has gone, she breaks down and then, in a wonderful flourish of petulant rage from Carroll Baker, hammers on the table with her fists like a spoiled child. When McKay returns safe and sound, the reunion is staged and acted similarly to their first meeting, but whereas that scene took place in tranquil sunlight, this takes place in darkness, which is an ominous sign of how their relationship has shifted. So angry is she with McKay when he denies he was lost, and then rejects Leech’s challenge of a fight, that Pat never even asks where he has been. By the time she finds out, it is too late: The divisions between them are now too wide. Ironically, McKay’s secret mission to buy a wedding present will lead him into a new relationship. While inspecting an old house, he is startled by Julie with a shotgun, his surprise accentuated not only by the hurried raising of his hands in surrender but by his falling through the floorboards on the porch. The interplay that follows has a seeming spontaneity that unobtrusively shows two people completely relaxed in each other’s company and sharing each other’s sense of humor and outlook. (When Buck Hannassey warns Julie about her relationship with the Terrills, she snaps back, “I’ll choose my own friends!” Her independence of spirit is similar to McKay’s.) Both Gregory Peck and Jean Simmons act with a disarming naturalness here that is the essence of screen acting: It makes one forget the camera. It prepares one almost subconsciously for the scene that follows, when McKay sees the Big Muddy for the first time and makes his offer to take it off Julie’s hands. Julie’s immediate response is to suggest it would be like selling it to the Terrills, but his firm reply is, “The name’s McKay, James McKay, will you sell Big Muddy to me, Miss Maragon?”

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As Julie thinks things through, rubbing her forehead in the intensity of her meditation, Wyler holds a shot on her for a good forty seconds, the longest sustained shot in the movie. It is a recognition of the importance of the moment, perhaps a visual approximation of McKay’s holding his breath as he waits for her response. But it is something more. If the camera seems entranced by her at that moment, it surely reflects McKay’s point of view. His formally phrased offer to buy the Big Muddy sounds almost like a proposal of marriage. That shot of Julie, and the moment she turns to McKay and accepts his offer, is possibly the loveliest single moment (out of many) in Jean Simmons’s career, and another example of Wyler’s remarkable way with love scenes. This does not involve showing characters as they make love. Rather, Wyler photographs something that is almost intangible: the precise moment when people fall in love, sometimes without realizing it themselves. If the Terrills are in the dark about McKay’s purchase of the Big Muddy and his plans to allow both sides access to water whenever they like, so, too, are the Hannasseys. In the morning after Rufus’s dramatic interruption of the Terrills’ party, Buck returns home (he has managed to escape being roughed up by Terrill’s men by hiding in the back of a wagon) and is told his father wants to see him. His greeting, “You want me, Pa?” is met by one of cinema’s more withering put-downs: “Before you were born I did.” It is an exchange that establishes their relationship in a sentence. A man of some principle and intelligence, Rufus seems to have harbored a lifelong disappointment with his son which in turn has fueled Buck’s truculence. Here the father upbraids his son over the harassment of McKay, which has had such dire consequences for the Hannassey community. To forestall his father’s anger, Buck intimates that Julie is attracted to him. “Could be there’s a side to you I ain’t never seen?” says Rufus, who wants to believe it about his son as well as the possibility it opens up about acquiring the Big Muddy. “Keep after her! Be nice!” he bellows, adding in a more confidential tone, “Take a bath sometimes.” Later, Hannassey’s thirsty cattle are driven away from the Big Muddy by Terrill’s men (some brilliant filming here, the camera focusing initially on Buck as he sees the horsemen approach, his face changing from puzzlement to suspicion and then to outrage as shots suddenly ring out and his horse twists and turns beneath him in terror). Rufus realizes the situation is desperate and that he must act fast. “Bring the girl,” he says to Buck, knowing that news of Julie’s kidnapping could lure the Terrills into a trap, but also hoping that he can persuade her to marry Buck. When he sees her horror at the idea, his anger at Buck erupts: “Sweet on you, huh? Why, if you ain’t the mother and father of all liars!” When Julie tells him the Big Muddy is no longer hers and to whom she has sold it, Rufus bellows “Well, who?! Well, who?!!” through her explanation with mounting impatience and anger — a thrilling piece of overlapping dialogue superbly acted by Ives and Simmons. Julie must remain Rufus’s prisoner until he checks on what she has told him. A proud man, Rufus has not taken kindly to Julie’s apparent revulsion at the prospect of marrying into the Hannassey family. It is another of those piquant class observations in Wyler’s work, unusual in a western but important here for what is to follow. As Julie sleeps face down in bed in the foreground of the frame, we see a lamp moving slowly from right to left at the back of the shot, as Buck pushes the table on which it has been set to open the blocked door. His assault of Julie is an enactment of long-smoldering frustrated desire (like Leech’s for Pat), but also an expression of fury at her social disdain. In his earlier scene with Julie in her home, Buck has grabbed her playfully and chuckled at her resistance, but this is for real: pent-up punishment for years of contemptuous treatment by his so-called superiors, and, among other things, an act of class vengeance. The attempted

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rape is thwarted by an enraged Rufus, who knocks Buck to the floor and then with his boot forces him to crawl out of the room. “You act like a dog, now crawl like one,” he shouts, an echo of Pat Terrill’s earlier remark to Buck, “I wouldn’t introduce you to a dog.” Something in Buck snaps. Humiliated first by Julie and now by his father, he lunges back into the room and grabs Rufus by the throat, vowing that this is the last time he will submit to his father’s bullying. The struggle is shot in full close-up, Rufus’s eyes almost bulging out of their sockets as he struggles to loosen his son’s grip on his neck. Finally pulling his son’s hands apart, he gasps, prophetically, “Some day I’ll have to kill you,” before throwing Buck out of the room and then staggering after him, leaving a horrified Julie to collapse sobbing against the door. For a scene of father/son rivalry leading to near-murderous violence, Wyler had contrived nothing so powerful since A House Divided nearly thirty years earlier. When McKay approaches Hannassey the following morning in his bid to avert bloodshed, he has already had to confront Major Terrill, whose men have been gathering outside Blanco Canyon. Terrill has threatened to shoot him if he goes any further. McKay has faced him down by saying such a shooting would only confirm that Terrill is conducting a private war of his own, but it still needs the intervention of Leech to prevent Terrill from carrying out his threat. Buck has secretly warned Julie that he will gun McKay down if she intimates that she is not there of her own free will. In fact, McKay’s early exchanges with Hannassey are conducted with mutual respect. It is only after Rufus insists on finishing what Terrill started, even though he is convinced of McKay’s sincerity in allowing him access to the Big Muddy, that McKay loses his temper. “You had me fooled for a while, Mr. Hannassey, with your self-righteous talk,” he says. “How many of those men out there know what this fight is really about? This isn’t their war; this is nothing but a personal feud between two selfish, ruthless, vicious old men — Henry Terrill and you!” The words raise the emotional stakes as Rufus is momentarily stung, Buck is angry on his father’s behalf, and Julie, now afraid that McKay has put himself in danger, intervenes to say that she is there of her own accord, pretending she has a relationship with Buck. Wondering why she is lying and why McKay is taking such a chance, Hannassey is quick to draw a conclusion that also supports the evidence of his own eyes: that McKay and Julie are in love. He seems to see it fractionally before the couple realize themselves what their actions have implied. The last to see it is Buck and, following so soon after Julie’s sole gesture of affection toward him that he now recognizes as fake, he explodes with rage. He slaps Julie. A fight breaks out between Buck and McKay, but when Buck is about to draw his gun, Rufus fires his own warning shot. “You don’t shoot an unarmed man, not while I’m around,” he growls, and suggests a different kind of gun battle, using the dueling pistols that McKay carries in his saddlebag. When Buck protests and asks why, Rufus snaps back, “Because I say so! For the first time in your life be the man I’d like you to be!” The implication of that is that he would like him to become more like McKay, which contrasts strikingly to the attitude of Henry Terrill, for whom McKay is the absolute antithesis of the kind of man he would like for his daughter. The point is wittily underlined when Rufus leads them out to the duel. “Follow me,” he says, before pausing, and adding, “gentlemen.” Ives delivers the line sardonically but not without a sliver of pride. After all, Rufus could never have conceived a context in which the term “gentleman” could be applied to Buck. The duel is splendidly filmed. In a medium shot we see Rufus in the background, loading the pistols, before the camera pulls back slightly to show the duelists facing each other at either side of the screen. As the countdown begins, McKay and Buck are back to back before each strides steadily to either corner of the wide screen. Moross reprises the

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music he introduced during Buck’s harassment of McKay on their first meeting but now in a slower, more somber mode, as if to remind us that this is where it has all led. Another irony here is that McKay is participating in the very ritual of which he strongly disapproves and which has led to the death of his own father. Would he have gone through with it if Buck had not fired first? In his fear, Buck has fired before his father had finished the signal, the shot grazing McKay’s forehead but giving him the right to countermand Rufus’s instinct to shoot the transgressor and to return fire on his own behalf. As he takes aim, we are given a medium shot of Buck, looking suddenly vulnerable and, appropriately enough, seeming like a lone figure facing a firing squad. The strain is too much for him. Unable to stand his ground, he rushes, whimpering, toward a wagon and cowers in terror behind a wheel. Not looking toward Buck anymore, McKay fires the bullet into the ground and then tosses the weapon down in a gesture of contempt, rather like the marshal at the end of High Noon, who throws his tin star to the ground. The contempt is surely not for Buck, for McKay knows enough about human nature to understand that man’s panic, but for the ritual itself and his participation in it. His shot into the ground is a symbolic act of rejection and negation. It parallels the moment in Friendly Persuasion when Gary Cooper’s hero has the rebel soldier at his mercy but refuses to fire the shot; to have done so would have betrayed the principles on which he had built his life. Similarly, as in Friendly Persuasion, the Big Country duel is the scene where McKay’s essential pacificism has to be tried and tested, and seen as something positive, not passive. One crisis has been averted but another is about to come to a tragic conclusion. The issue has once again to do with what constitutes cowardice, and the trials that three of the main characters have to undergo under the shadow of that word. We have seen McKay’s refusal to accept Leech’s challenge to fight, which has led Pat to the brink of calling him a coward, and to a turning point in their relationship. (“Coward? Why don’t you say it, Pat, are you afraid of the word?” McKay has said. “I’m not, and I’m not going to spend the rest of my life demonstrating how brave I am.” Pat snaps back, “You’ve already demonstrated that quite fully enough!”) While the duel has been in preparation, Steve Leech has argued with the major outside Blanco Canyon about the folly of riding into an ambush. For this, he is called “yellow.” Although he will later follow the major out of loyalty, there is a clear sense that his previous unswerving obedience has been breached and, partly through McKay’s influence, he will no longer uncritically accept everything the major tells him to do. And now in the most abject case, Buck’s courage has failed him and he has to face the withering contempt of his father, who pauses only to spit in his face. Still on the ground, Buck looks through the spokes of the wagon wheel and sees Julie happily welcome McKay back from danger. The low-angle point-of-view shot could hardly convey more powerfully the absolute abjection of a man who has sunk to his lowest point and now sees his romantic hopes dashed, as the woman he perhaps loved now in the arms of not only another man but the kind of man Buck could never aspire to be. He seizes a gun from another cowboy and points it at McKay, and Rufus shoots him. As Buck staggers toward his father, Rufus shouts out, “I told you! I told you I’d do it, but you wouldn’t believe me, damn your soul!” Catching Buck as he falls, he seems about to berate the lifeless body but abruptly pulls it to him in a paroxysm of anguish and grief. A fated relationship has climaxed and Rufus’s horrible prophecy has come true, a culmination of the pressures of paternity that have been so destructive at so many levels in the film. His heart broken, Rufus now sees the truth of what McKay has told him, and sees that the only way this can be ended is in a final face-off between himself and Terrill. His challenge

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echoes across the canyon and Terrill accepts, setting off alone for the showdown. Prior to striding away, Rufus (in Burl Ives’s performance) gives McKay what I always think of the Walter Huston look at the end of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which seems like the passing of a seal of trust to a younger man to act honorably in the future on the basis of what each has learned. Hannassey and Terrill approach each other down a narrowing canyon, the sinister tread of Moross’s music rising to a crescendo as the two draw nearer. Shots are fired. Both men fall. The aerial shot of the bodies slumped across each other echoes the camerawork of the McKay/Leech fight and has the same connotations: the spirit of violence now muted and miniaturized. The ending is in keeping with the overall spirit of the film in that it is serene, quietly optimistic, yet also off beat and open-ended. The Hannassey and Terrill men drift away after this final confrontation, and we are left to ponder the future. After the deaths of Rufus and Buck, what will happen to the Hannasseys? After the death of Major Terrill, what will happen to Leech, and to Pat? It is like the collective sigh after the passing of a tyrant: relief that he has gone, but where do we go from here? The victors at the end of the film are an intriguingly diverse trio to be carrying the message of a western: a pacifist Easterner (McKay), an educated schoolteacher ( Julie), and a peaceful Mexican (Ramon). It is an ending that movingly broadens the inclusiveness of the American Dream. In its January 1960 issue, the British magazine Films and Filming voted The Big Country as the Best Film from Any Source “for the combination of a profound theme in a popular entertainment format and its high standard of technique, particularly Wyler’s direction, Franz Planer’s photography and the music score by Jerome Moross” (7). The film’s combination of profundity and popular appeal is indeed remarkable. It is an epic that is light on its feet and with seasoned professionals at the top of their game. Christopher Fry’s epigraph to this analysis is certainly borne out by my own experience of the film. It is an adventure that is also a love story, a political allegory, a surrogate war film, and a thoughtful reflection on notions and aspects of masculinity, heroism, courage, and national identity. It is by turns satirical, philosophical, ironic, and romantic; humorous, spectacular and contemplative, surveying the depths of human delusion in all its folly but always seeking out and often finding the best in human nature. It is, in short, everything a popular motion picture should be in its endeavor to entertain, engage, and even enlighten a mass audience. Critical consensus tends not to group The Big Country with Wyler’s greatest films, but if I were to have one Wyler film on my desert island, this would be it. A personal footnote: no critical account of The Big Country would be complete without a special mention of its score by Jerome Moross — in Charlton Heston’s view, “probably the best ever composed for a western” (Heston: 166). The main theme has become a fixture on anthologies of great film music, and versions of the score have been recorded several times, but it was not until 2007 that a definitive version was released on CD for the first time. It has been the subject of detailed and valuable musicological analysis by John Caps, but Moross himself, whenever invited to provide similar analytical notes to recordings of his works, refused. As he explained in an unpublished interview with Craig Reardon (April 16, 1979), “What actually counts is what happens when you hear it.” A former student of Aaron Copland and a close friend of Bernard Herrmann, Moross had been working periodically in movies for nearly twenty years prior to The Big Country. He had been invited by Copland to help orchestrate the score for Our Town (1940) and had continued to work as an orchestrator of film music over the next decade, most notably as one of the team that orchestrated Hugo Friedhofer’s score for The Best Years of Our Lives.

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At the end of the 1940s he began composing scores for mainly low-budget films, though his first love had always been writing music for the theater, where he experienced great success. He came to Wyler’s attention via the enthusiasm of Samuel Goldwyn Jr., for whom he had worked very successfully, and who raved to Wyler about Moross’s splendid score for his recent production, The Proud Rebel (1958), a fine western directed by Michael Curtiz. The resulting commission was to produce, in Christopher Palmer’s words, “the score of a lifetime” (313). In a letter to Palmer dated March 22, 1973, (kindly supplied to me by Moross’s daughter, Susanna), Moross explained the inspiration for the main theme. The description is worth quoting in full: I was shown the unfinished film before I saw the script and I remembered that as it opened with the horses and stagecoach hurtling across the Great Plains, I had the sensation of being back more than 21 years to the first time I had seen the West. I traveled by bus from Chicago to Los Angeles (I had no money for the train) and as we hit the Plains I got so excited that I stopped off in Albuquerque (which at that time was a small town of 35,000 people) and the next day I got to the edge of town and then walked out onto the flatland with a marvelous feeling of being alone in the vastness with the mountains cutting off the horizon. When it came to write the Main Title of the film, I wrote the string figure and the opening theme almost automatically.

The main title theme was an instant classic, having a glorious sense of space, grandeur, and rhythmic vitality that immediately sets up the keenest expectations about the land it evokes and the people who inhabit it. It has been called “the epic western theme tune to end all epic western theme tunes” (Parkinson and Jeavons: 73). Mervyn Cooke offered an imaginative analogy when he wrote of Moross’s “famous and much imitated theme, in which cowboy melodic brashness meets the swirling ostinati of Widor’s equally famous organ Tocatta” (129). After such an opening, the remarkable thing is that, despite the length of the score (74 minutes) and the relatively short time Moross had to write it (ten weeks), the invention never flags. “The Welcoming” music is almost as memorable in its evocation of the frontier spirit as the main theme. When Pat Terrill rides out in a huff after McKay’s argument with her father, the music wonderfully catches her pride and anger before subsiding and then segueing into the excitement of “The Raid” as the major’s men ride into Blanco Canyon intent on retribution. It is one of the great moments of film music, where score and image are welded so tightly together that is almost impossible to imagine how one could have been conceived independently of the other. It is an absolute fulfillment of Jean Cocteau’s dictum about film music, where the ideal fusion of film and music is achieved when it is impossible to tell whether it is the film that seems to be driving the music forward or the other way around. Another remarkable sequence occurs when Major Terrill, facing a mutiny from Steve Leech and his men, rides into Blanco Canyon to face the Hannasseys alone. Moross composes what Palmer describes as “a pseudo-religious chorale” (316), derived from the score’s opening brass fanfare, to suggest the major’s sense of martyrdom as he rides slowly toward his fate. However, the motif also cleverly catches the men’s feelings of sorrow and guilt as they watch him go, and could be said to anticipate their change of heart, as first Leech and then the other men follow the major into the canyon, the music rising in volume and excitement and repeating “The Raid” motif to suggest a temporary restored unity of purpose before subsiding again to a quiet fatalism. Elsewhere, musical felicities abound: a particularly beautiful waltz for the dance shared by McKay and Pat during the party (Moross could always compose a good waltz); a witty pastiche of horror film music as McKay and Julie try to

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outdo each other in gruesomeness with their respective stories, and with Moross drowning out the dialogue to simulate McKay’s fake swooning in nausea as he tries to blot out Julie’s tale. The frenzied “Attempted Rape” music is transformed into melancholy cathartic release when Julie is left alone. The repetitions, silences, and changes of volume during “McKay in Blanco Canyon” convey the sense of echo and anxiety as he and Ramon proceed toward the Hannasseys while being aware that there is a rifle behind every rock. The reprise of the main theme on solo violin in the finale as Julie looks across at McKay creates a moment of romantic intimacy before the theme is taken up again by the full orchestra to signal the hopeful ending of the drama. All of these, and others, confirm the melodic richness, rhythmic excitement, and superb orchestration of this mighty score that never even momentarily dwindles into sentimentality or mere prettiness. In The Composer in Hollywood, Christopher Palmer wrote that he discovered classical music through film music, and that for him the seminal score was Miklos Rozsa’s Kings of Kings, which delivered, as he put it, “symphonic music, orchestral, and evidently the work of a professional composer with his own individual sound, in a film? It was a fascinating phenomenon” (8). For me, a similar sense of discovery came through Jerome Moross’s score for The Big Country and, half a century onward, its freshness, vitality and inventiveness remain undimmed. Film music at its finest, certainly, and more: one of the finest American orchestral compositions of the twentieth century.

Ben-Hur (1959) “All of the artistes, they will never forgive me for Ben-Hur. For me to have made one of the most successful commercial pictures in the history of the business is an unforgivable sin. But while it wasn’t exactly my style of picture, this was one of the things that intrigued me. I was wondering, before I started out, if I knew how to make such a picture” — William Wyler to Curtis Hanson, 1967

According to Charlton Heston’s journal, The Actor’s Life, Igor Stravinsky told him that he admired his performance as Ben-Hur “vastly”— and Stravinsky was not a man given to vast admiration (Heston: 85). “There are no lions or orgies,” reported the London Times (December 15, 1959) from the film’s Los Angeles premiere, “and Mr. Wyler has succeeded in making powerful and impressive what used to be hollow and insincere.” It went on: “His sentimentality is embarrassing but nothing can detract from his achievement in making a film of heart, mind and blood out of material that could have been dedicated to nothing more than melodramatic excess.” It is curious to see The Times refer to Wyler’s “sentimentality” when a decade later Andrew Sarris referred to Wyler’s lack of feeling in his films, but by the end of the 1960s, it was fashionable to sneer at the Hollywood epic and the Oscar-winning directors of Wyler’s generation (Huston, Stevens, Wilder, Zinnemann) who, in Sarris’s classification of American directors in The American Cinema, offered “less than meets the eye” (Sarris: 155–70). Perhaps as a reaction against its huge commercial returns and its (at that time) recordbreaking haul of eleven Oscars, Ben-Hur has proved not to be a favorite with the critics, and Wyler’s reputation as a major director tended to sink in inverse proportion to the film’s success. He had come to embody, in many critics’ eyes, Hollywood excess and conformity. Even Cahiers du Cinema stopped talking to him, as Wyler commented with dry understatement, “This is not a New Wave picture.” In an interview with Gene D. Phillips, Wyler

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elaborated on this: “There is a group of French critics who hate the picture because it is so commercial, which in their view is the opposite of artistic. Critics like that lost respect for my work after Ben-Hur. They said that Wyler had become a commercial parasite, whatever that is. To them I can only say that Ben-Hur was never intended to be anything more or less than an adventure story with no artistic pretensions at all. Had I conceived artistic aspirations that were at odds with the kind of simple story that I was telling, the film would have failed both commercially and artistically” (Phillips: 10). In defending the film and the stylistic appropriateness to the material, Wyler might be selling himself short. There was no need to be defensive: Ben-Hur is a magnificent achievement. Subsequent directors who wanted to accomplish the difficult task of successfully combining an intimate personal story against a vast historical backdrop (people like David Lean, Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, and Sergio Leone) would self-confessedly look to Ben-Hur to see how it was done. I would agree with Derek Elley’s conclusion in his valuable survey of the epic film, and his reclamation of it as a distinguished and unjustly vilified genre, that Ben-Hur is “the richest, and perhaps noblest, historical epic of all” (Elley: 135). The self-conscious grandeur of the film is surely and rightly insisted on from the very beginning — indeed, before that. Heard before the film begins is Miklos Rozsa’s mighty orchestral overture, lasting nearly seven minutes. It sets the atmosphere and introduces the key themes to be developed in the score. The credits are set against Michelangelo’s great painting, The Creation of Adam which depicts the figure of God reaching to touch the fingers of the reclining Adam. There has been much critical discussion of the appropriateness of this image to the film. The painting itself has been seen to be ambiguous: is God’s touch about to spark life into Adam, or is the fact that Adam’s hand hangs limp and God is straining to make contact suggestive of Adam’s denial of God? This is analogous to the situation of Ben-Hur and Christ, where, although Christ gives water to Ben-Hur and thus saves his life, Ben-Hur for a long time seems in denial of this gift (“I should have done better if I’d poured it back into the sand”). And in his pursuit of vengeance, Ben-Hur moves further away from God. The image of the fingers not quite touching might also be seen as analogous to the relationship between Ben-Hur and Messala, whose former closeness is now being rent asunder by conflicting loyalties — in Messala’s Ben-Hur as galley slave: Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur (1959). case, to the Roman Empire, of

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which he is now proudly a part, and, in Ben-Hur’s case, to his Jewish people, whose aspirations for freedom from Roman domination he shares. Michelangelo’s painting expresses, on one level, a strong sense of frustration (the fingers can never touch). The critic William Fitzgerald has skillfully shown how the motif of frustration is deeply embedded in the character of Ben-Hur itself. Fitzgerald cites several examples of this: Ben-Hur’s inability to embrace or even reveal himself to his mother and sister after they have become lepers; the rage he feels as a galley slave when lashed by Arrius’s whip, which he must nevertheless instantly repress (it is the first thing Arrius notices about him, but sees it as the will to fight back tempered by the good sense to control that impulse). Ben-Hur is in despair when he has Messala in his power but cannot kill him because such an act would be followed by the execution of his mother and sister. Fitzgerald says, “The Michelangelo painting is an extraordinarily economic condensation of many of the movie’s themes ... its homoerotic tinge injects the intensity and pathos of a (socially) impossible love into this image of frustrated touching” ( Joshel et al: 39). One might add that this feeling is carried through into the final scene between these two former best friends who are now mortal enemies, a scene which is an angry and agonized inversion of their initial joyous reunion. Ben-Hur’s cry of anguish when he learns from the dying Messala about the fate of his mother and sister exactly echoes the tortured cry he made all those years ago when he could have killed Messala but did not. Heston’s acting at these moments, where he seems literally to shake with the violence of an emotion that he cannot fully unleash, is tremendously powerful and of a piece with the whole performance, whose epic presence and clarity of line never waver. The film’s undoubted grandeur in its visual conception needed to be matched by a corresponding verbal eloquence. One of the most controversial elements of Ben-Hur turned out to be the script, always the most difficult aspect of the historical-epic genre, for which one has to find a writing style that has period authenticity and grace yet also seems natural and conversational, while avoiding colloquialism and anachronism. (Critics will each have their own choice examples, no doubt, of films that fall short in this regard: mine is the moment in The Robe where Richard Boone’s Pontius Pilate appears, washing his hands and exclaiming, “I’ve had a terrible night!”) Wyler and his team on Ben-Hur were well aware of this challenge. In his introduction to his collected film criticism, The Pleasure Dome, Graham Greene recalls with some amusement an occasion when he had lunch in the Dorchester hotel with the producer of Ben-Hur, Sam Zimbalist, who wanted Greene’s advice on a rewrite because, as Zimbalist said, “We find a sort of anti-climax after the Crucifixion” (Greene: 4). Actually, in the final film, there is no such anti-climax. The film has only around ten minutes to run anyway, and in that time, it manages an eclipse, a storm, and a miracle. I have always suspected that Greene mischievously misremembered that conversation, and that Zimbalist (who tragically died during the production of the film) was quite sensibly concerned, as any dramatist of Ben-Hur would be, about how to sustain the same level of dramatic tension after the excitement of the chariot race. The appointment with Greene might even have gone beyond the fact that he was a novelist interested in religious subtexts, and an experienced and gifted screenwriter. Key scenes between the priest and the lieutenant in his novel The Power and the Glory raise themes that are to be central in two important scenes in Ben-Hur: an early discussion between Sextus (Andre Morell) and Messala (Stephen Boyd) about “how do you fight an idea?,” and a later scene between Pontius Pilate (Frank Thring) and Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston), where Pilate’s expressions of friendship are counterbalanced by his recognition of the danger the man represents to the State. Miracles are described in Greene’s novel, The End of the Affair (1951), and the novel Greene was

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working on at the time, A Burnt-out Case, was set in a leper colony, which has some relevance to Ben-Hur, as leprosy is a key motif in the final part of the film. Sometimes cited as evidence of Hollywood philistinism, Zimbalist’s meeting with Greene seemed actually both knowledgeable and shrewd. In the event, Greene did not contribute to the final film, but several fine writers did. The screenplay is credited to Karl Tunberg, but his draft was considerably reworked. Wyler always felt that the dispute over the ultimate screenwriting credit cost it the distinction of making a clean sweep at the Oscars (it was the one nomination of the twelve that did not actually win). Significant contributions were made by Gore Vidal, who worked on BenHur’s relationship with Messala, and by the poet-dramatist, Christopher Fry, who worked on the language. Wyler was particularly fond of quoting Sheik Ilderim’s (Hugh Griffith) remark to Ben-Hur when feasting in the Sheikh’s tent —“Was the food not to your liking?”— as evidence of Fry’s elegant way with period dialogue. There are even Shakespearian echoes in other contexts; Messala’s “Now the wheel has turned” when he describes to Drusus (Terence Longdon) his feeling that his command of the garrison in Judea is the fulfillment of a boyhood dream; and Esther’s “No cause” when she seeks to allay the fear of Miriam (Martha Scott) as they venture from the leper colony into the outside world, a phrase, beautifully delivered by Haya Harareet, which has the gentleness of a Cordelia seeking to calm the agitation of her stricken father, King Lear. The poetic use of repetition, symbolism, and metaphor will be considered in due course, but it is worth noting here that much of the dialogue seems to be written in a discreet blank verse, which the superb cast delivers with a real sensitivity to rhythm and cadence. This is particularly marked in another moment in the scene in Sheik Ilderim’s tent when Balthasar (Finlay Currie) picks up on Ben-Hur’s feelings of hatred but attempts to steer him away from his path of violence with his prophecy of the coming of a Redeemer. Finlay Currie’s delivery of the speech, augmented by Wyler’s framing of his noble profile and sensitively accompanied by Miklos Rozsa’s lovely music (that links the moment with Balthasar’s presence at the birth of Christ), turns it into a poignant poem of peace. One could go through the entire film picking out felicities and subtleties of the script (it seems to me easily the best written of all the Hollywood spectaculars of this period, and since), but two important scenes serve to illustrate the point. The first is the early reunion between Ben-Hur and Messala, when Messala has become commander of the Roman garrison in Judea and is visited by his close friend from his boyhood days, Judah Ben-Hur, who is now one of the richest men in the district. (When a centurion announces Ben-Hur’s arrival in a condescending manner, Messala rebukes him sternly; Sextus sees this as political shrewdness, but Messala’s anger on Ben-Hur’s behalf is also personally driven.) The meeting is a pivotal one in the film, because it provides the springboard for everything that follows. Wyler undoubtedly recognized this and knew the scene had to convey, with force and eloquence, three essential elements: the warmth of the men’s friendship, moments of awkwardness and unease that have intimations of the enmity to come, and the motivational basis for Messala’s subsequent venomous behavior toward a man who had been his closest friend (something that is never adequately explained or characterized in the 1880 novel or the 1925 film). Aided by a fine script, and superb acting by Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd, Wyler achieves all of these aims. The intensity of their emotion during their reunion seems to overwhelm both men as they greet one another, at first near to tears and then laughing together almost in embarrassment and surprise at the force of their feelings. This closeness

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will be symbolized by their javelin contest, where their weapons quiver in suggestive proximity as they strike their target where the beams cross. (Wyler will ironically recall this image when Ben-Hur is later led out to start his sentence as a galley slave, the camera tilting up slightly to show the beams now without their symbols of friendship, the two javelins, though also fleetingly emphasizing the shape of the cross as a hint of the source of BenHur’s future salvation.) The subsequent conversation, though, will have moments of tension where Messala’s Roman arrogance and certainty about the rightness of Rome’s dominance will clash with Ben-Hur’s desire for the freedom of his people from this imperialist domination. “You are very cruel to your conquerors,” says Messala as he jokes about the quality of the wine, but his friend winces at the word, and their toast of friendship seems to leave a number of questions unresolved, particularly Messala’s attempt to enlist Ben-Hur’s help in persuading his people to abandon their resistance to Roman rule. Unlike in the novel and the earlier film, Wyler splits the reunion and the argument into two separate scenes rather than containing them in one. The approach gives greater weight to both scenes; and before the argument, it allows the insertion of Messala’s reunion with Ben-Hur’s mother, Miriam, and his sister, Tirzah (Cathy O’Donnell), which will add an extra twist of cruelty to Messala’s later imprisonment of them on what he knows is a false charge. If that were not enough, it is also strongly implied — indeed, stated — that Tirzah has been in love with Messala from a very young age (yet another case of devastating unrequited love in a Wyler film, and not the only instance in Ben-Hur). Messala gives Tirzah a gift of a brooch, part of his spoils from a campaign in Libya. There are a number of gifts in the film, all of which are significant, and not all of them beneficial or enriching. For example, we never do learn what happens to the white Arab horse that Ben-Hur has offered to Messala as a present before their friendship is suddenly destroyed in rage and disappointment; but one feels that, symbolically, it will make a reappearance at the chariot race as part of Ben-Hur’s team to defeat Messala. In the argument itself, the specter of McCarthyism swings suddenly and unexpectedly into the frame. Messala wants to know who among Ben-Hur’s friends refused to renounce rebellion against Rome. He wants him to name names. When Ben-Hur refuses to play the role of informer, Messala leaves him no room for maneuver: “You have no choice: you’re either for me or against me.” This is the language of HUAC, whose effect on Hollywood had been so devastating and against whom Wyler had been one of the first to organize resistance. Indeed, one can see how, like so many of the McCarthyist inquisitors, Messala is not only an ideologue, clearly wedded to what Rome stands for and represents, but also a political opportunist. When a falling slate from the roof of Ben-Hur’s mansion causes the injury of the new Roman governor, Messala seizes on the event for his own advantage. He knows it was an accident and no act of treason, but by punishing his friend and the family, he reckons he will be feared for his ruthlessness, and rebellion will cease. Nevertheless, what is behind the injustice and brutality of Messala’s action? Does it not go further than political calculation? In his memoir Palimpsest, Gore Vidal infamously claimed that he suggested to Wyler the idea that the two had been lovers in their youth and Messala’s vindictiveness might thus stem from a lover’s as well as a Roman’s hurt at BenHur’s rejection of the proposed partnership. According to Vidal’s account, Wyler agreed to the scenes between them being written with this in mind, so long as it was never made explicit in the dialogue and that Heston was never told about it. Whatever the truth of this account (it has been disputed, and Wyler, according to some reports, said he had no recollection of this conversation), there is no doubt that the reunion is presented as an over-

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whelming experience for both men. I cannot recall a similar scene in a film of that period where two male friends reunite with quite such an overt spillage of joy. One certainly suspects Vidal’s hand in Messala’s comment at one moment during the scene, “Is there anything so sad as unrequited love?” It is a jocular reference to Judea’s hostility to Rome as opposed to Rome’s love of Judea, but that in turn could be a metaphor for the film’s central relationship between the two men. One vital element in their relationship is that, during their boyhood, Messala once saved Ben-Hur’s life (“It was the best thing I ever did,” he says). This will touch on another recurrent motif in the film: Christ will also save Ben-Hur’s life in the desert; Ben-Hur will save the life of Quintus Arrius ( Jack Hawkins, in a characteristically dignified performance) during the sea battle — all acts that, like Messala’s, will have strange, unforeseen, and even perverse consequences. However, in the immediate context, Messala might well feel BenHur owes him some allegiance. His anger at Ben-Hur’s rejection goes well beyond that of a possibly spurned lover. When Ben-Hur momentarily escapes his captors and storms into Messala’s headquarters to threaten him with a javelin, he begs Messala at least to release his mother and sister. It is at this point that Messala explodes into anger and throws the word “beg” back in his face (“Beg? Didn’t I beg you...”). There is surely a tangle of emotions there: a rejected lover’s rage, perhaps, but more than that, a Roman’s wounded pride and feelings even of humiliation by a social inferior, the pain of an emotional debt unpaid, all intermingled with the fact that this accident involving Ben-Hur has conveniently played into Messala’s hands. The core motivation of the plot has not only been amplified and strengthened but also given a rare emotional and political depth. How superbly Stephen Boyd acts out every stage of Messala’s development: the affection and the arrogance, his excitement at and involvement in the Roman ideal, his desire to make his friend part of it, his fury and spite when these hopes are dashed, even the way he pulls out the javelin from the headboard behind him after Ben-Hur has been dragged away, and inspects it thoughtfully, as if recalling the earlier scene when thrown javelins symbolized their bonds of friendship. The eruptions of excitement and irritation, the eloquent dismissive hand movements, the vocal variety and range are unforgettable. For many commentators, Messala was always the most interesting character in Ben-Hur and Boyd rises magnificently to the challenge. He never did anything finer on film. The other scene I particularly wish to single out for the elegance of the writing, the fineness of the acting, and the exactitude of Wyler’s visual framing comes after the climactic chariot race. Pontius Pilate brings a message for Ben-Hur from Quintus Arrius: Ben-Hur has been made a citizen of Rome. Frank Thring’s performance has been described as “menacing” in the Introduction to the World Classics’ edition of the novel (Wallace: xxiii), but Derek Elley is surely closer to the mark when he talks of the blend of “friendliness and hard pragmatism” (Elley: 134). Pilate is conciliatory, suggesting that Messala’s death in the race is deserved retribution for his actions. He seems genuine in his regret at the fate of BenHur’s mother and sister, who are now consigned to the Valley of the Lepers; and acknowledges that great wrongs often are the accompaniments of great power. Nevertheless, he is also a realist (“The wise man knows the world he lives in”). He knows that, as Roman governor of the province, he cannot allow the new heroic status of Ben-Hur to the people of Judea (“their one true god,” as he ironically calls him) to foster insurrection and be a threat to the State. For his part, Ben-Hur, while recognizing the honor being paid to him by his adopted father, Quintus Arrius (for whom he has a genuine regard), is also acutely aware that Rome is the cause of his current sorrows, and believes it was Rome that corrupted Mes-

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sala’s soul. When Pilate attempts to address him as the adopted son of Arrius, he replies: “I am Judah Ben-Hur,” a statement not only of personal but national identity. This refrain has been heard before in the film — from Quintus Arrius, when he wanted him to kill him, and from Simonides, when Ben-Hur has returned and the old man intones the name as if it were a miracle. In the scene with Pilate, the phrase is not simply a statement of defiant individualism but, implicitly, of political rebellion as well. To clinch the point, Ben-Hur returns Quintus Arrias’s ring to Pilate (“I honor him too much to wear it any longer”), another example of a gift that has a strange destiny and destination. It contrasts intriguingly with Esther’s slave ring that he has taken in fair exchange for her freedom and which seems, eerily, to have intimated his own future as a slave. Still, he has continued to wear it in memory of her, one feels, and out of faith that his former fortunes might return (“It’s become part of my hand”). Charlton Heston renders all the scene’s variety of moods — anger, gratitude, understanding, defiance — to the point that, as Heston noted in his journals, even Wyler complimented him on his acting in that scene, the first time he had paid such a compliment during nearly two years of working together. (Wyler was rather parsimonious in handing out praise.) What is also remarkable in the scene is Wyler’s direction, his use of cinematic space that André Bazin admired so much. The room in which the meeting takes place becomes dramatic territory in itself and charged with meaning, something that Pilate will exploit with characteristic histrionic flair. He will (literally) meet Ben-Hur halfway, but will also ensure that the hero’s movement either forward or backward in the room is nothing less than a choice of future identity and destiny, just as Pilate’s movement up the steps signifies a symbolic movement from former friendship to becoming an instrument of Rome. As these scenes demonstrate, Ben-Hur, for all its length (212 minutes) and potential for epic diffuseness, has a very cogent dramatic structure that knits all the events together. The hero will become a wanderer, searching for inner peace and cultural identity in a world of conflicting faiths and alternating grandeur and barbarity. Cumulative visual and verbal motifs in the film (water, stone, steps, blood, variations of light and dark, heights and depths) mark crucial stages on his physical and spiritual journey. The use of shadow is another recurrent motif as the lives of the main characters (Ben-Hur, Messala, Quintus Arrius, and the Christ) shadow each other and then mysteriously interact in a mosaic of love, hate, revenge, and redemption. Lew Wallace’s novel is ponderously written, in my view, and the Wyler film immeasurably improves its narrative structure and its psychological motivation. Nevertheless, it has a great central idea, which undoubtedly contributed to its immense popularity: the paralleling of the Christ story with that of an ordinary man caught up in extraordinary events. It is an adventure story that, to an alert director like Wyler, has enormous potential for development, offering opportunities for contrast, conflict, ambivalences, and ambiguities. Ben-Hur is a hero who goes from the extremes of wealth and prestige to those of poverty and suffering, almost literally divested of everything he owns — and then back again, though now in a different guise and in enemy costume. He is a Jew who, for a while, becomes a Roman; a man whose best friend becomes his worst enemy; and a slave whose principal oppressor will become his savior, patron, and surrogate father figure. “It is a strange fate that brought me here,” says Ben-Hur as he accepts the ring from Quintus Arrius, to whom he has become a beloved substitute for the son he has lost. The path that has brought Ben-Hur to Arrius begins in the desert sequence that leads up to the hero’s years as a galley slave. It exemplifies some of the drama’s extremities and contrasts that help sustain interest. A long shot of a procession of slaves led across an unfor-

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giving landscape under a baking sun is followed by details that emphasize their distress: a shot of their bloodied feet walking across stones; one of them being cut loose when he has collapsed with the heat and then being kicked down a hill and left to die. Arriving in Nazareth and pausing briefly for water, the legion’s commander ensures that water is given to the soldiers and horses first and instructs “No water for him” when Ben-Hur tries to drink. Ben-Hur collapses to the ground, praying for help. A shadow falls across his face and a stranger comes to his aid with a gourd of water. When the commander attempts to intervene, something about the presence of the man causes the commander to hesitate and then retreat. Lashed back into line, Ben-Hur turns to look back with gratitude toward the stranger — unbeknown to him, his first encounter with Christ (Claude Heater)— before being hauled away to the galleys. (When he later gives water to Christ on the procession to Calvary, recognition will dawn.) The shifts of mood and emotion here are expertly conveyed through the alternating brutality of the imagery and the life-giving tenderness at the scene’s core. By never showing Christ’s face but only the reaction he inspires from those who see him, Wyler allows audiences to imagine for themselves the grandeur of his presence, one that is sufficiently awesome to stop a Roman commander in his tracks. Wyler took a lot of care over the casting of this minor part of the commander, even delaying the shooting of the filming when his first choice for the role (a bit player named Remington Oldstead) haggled over the fee and the first assistant director had mistakenly brought in a replacement. Wyler stood firm, for he was adamant about what he wanted: someone whose ruddy-faced countenance could proclaim Roman brutality, which in turn would add to the power of that moment when even he is paralyzed by what he senses is a mysterious superior strength. In his autobiography In the Arena, Charlton Heston gives an evocative account of this moment: “We never see Christ’s face in the scene, but the decurion’s brutish, stunned awe looking into the face of divinity was indescribable. It’s one of the best moments in the whole film” (Heston: 197). It would be impossible to leave this sequence without paying tribute to Rozsa’s score, which is perfectly attuned to the dramatic detail. The harshness of the brass during the trek across the desert is such that one can almost feel the oppressive heat; by contrast, the delicate scoring of the Christ theme for pipe organ, string harmonics, and harp seems to liquefy the sound even as Ben-Hur drinks the water offered to him. As the water gives him strength to continue with the journey, we hear a resurgence of the noble theme associated with the hero, which moves then into a majestic declamation of the Christ theme as Ben-Hur looks back at the man who saved him. Then, a long shot of a line of Roman galleys gives Rozsa the cue to hammer out the galley theme, momentarily sounding as stark and unyielding as Gustav Holst’s pounding “Bringer of War” theme from the “Mars” section of his Planets suite. The galley theme plunges us back into the reality of Ben-Hur’s world. In all, a great musical sequence that climaxes with that orchestral reminder that the hero has still some way to go before his suffering will be eased and the chance of revenge or redemption will present itself. The accentuation of such dramatic extremes gives the film a dynamism wholly absent from the turgidity of the novel. A man who has spoken out against violence is persecuted and then propelled through circumstances into becoming a revenge hero. He rejects everything that does not further his plan of vengeance until he is in danger of becoming the very thing he set out to destroy. “It’s as if you’ve become Messala,” Esther tells him. “Hatred is turning you to stone.” It is sometimes said that Esther is irrelevant to the dramatic structure of Ben-Hur, but she is actually the film’s heart and, at moments like this, its moral barometer. Haya Harareet’s performance is very touching in its direct simplicity and sensitivity. The

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image of stone that Esther conjures up is particularly associated with the Roman part of the story, and the slate that fell from the roof of Ben-Hur’s abode and which, in her wise words, is “still falling.” The consequences of that dreadful day are felt even after Messala’s death. “I am thirsty still,” says the hero at another stage, the reference to thirst recalling the drink given to him by Christ in the desert (ironically keeping him alive for vengeance). That Ben-Hur still wants water suggests unquenched thirst of an unsatisfied obsession. The chariot race is the culmination of the Ben-Hur/Messala part of the story and remains one of the most exciting and spectacular action sequences ever devised for the screen. Andrew Marton headed the filming of the second unit, and legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt was in charge of the training of the charioteers. No praise could be too

The chariot race: Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur (1959).

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lavish for either of them; the scene is put together so that the audience seems almost to be among the participants. There is no music needed here to underscore the action, just the sound of the horses’ hooves and the roars of the crowd. (Indeed, because of this, Wyler felt compelled to add a sequence showing the parading of the charioteers before the race, even at the expense of authenticity, because it would be the only opportunity the audience would have to appreciate the grandeur of the set design of the arena.) Once into the race, one’s concentration is focused almost exclusively on the riders. Although he did not direct the race, Wyler supervised the editing of it, and the incisive and staccato-like montage has a fluidity quite unlike the stolidity of much epic cinema of that time. (It also anticipates spectacular movie-action sequences of the future.) In an interview about the sequence, Andrew Marton recalled that he was told by producer Sam Zimbalist that “it was not to be just a race, but a race to the death that carried the implacable hatred of Ben-Hur and Messala to its logical conclusion” (Koszarski: 290). This idea that the race is essentially the ultimate extension of the conflict between the two main characters is emphasized in a brief exchange between the two before they lead out their chariots on parade. “This is the day, Judah,” says Messala, “it’s between us now,” to which Ben-Hur responds: “Yes. This is the day.” It is a measure of the film’s intelligence that this ritualistic exchange is not delivered in a tone of macho combat, for the conflict is much more complex than that. In fact, Stephen Boyd delivers the line, “It’s between us now” almost caressingly, as if recognizing that this is the final consequence of thwarted love as well as implacable hate. The contrast between Messala’s black horses racing against BenHur’s white ones emphasizes the intensity of the rivalry, but also provides a fleeting, subliminal recollection of the white Arab mare Ben-Hur had given Messala as token of love and friendship (“Oh, Judah, you are good,” Messala has said) before the argument that dashed all that they have meant to each other. Everything in the chariot race — Messala’s ruthlessness towards his opponents, Ben-Hur’s determination to stay the course, even when one collision compels him to do a somersault to stay on the chariot — builds to the moment when the two arch rivals are finally ahead of the rest of the field, neck and neck with each other, and racing to the finish. At this point, the film deviates from both the novel and the 1925 film to do something very unusual. In Wyler’s film, Ben-Hur does not win the chariot race, Messala loses it; it is a very significant difference. Unlike in the novel and previous adaptations, where BenHur essentially outmaneuvers Messala, here Messala loses control and becomes the architect of his own destruction. He starts using his whip on Ben-Hur, his enmity getting the better of his judgment. As the Sheik has told Judah, there are no rules in the arena, but the gesture recalls the cruelty of Rome and the punishment in the slave-ship. This loss of personal control causes Messala’s chariot to spin out of control and throw his body onto the turf, where it is crushed by the horses of a pursuing charioteer. Yet the motivation is subtler than one of innate viciousness or pure evil (“No, Judah, I am not evil,” he has told Ben-Hur earlier). One feels this to be true: The ostensible villains in Wyler always have a point of view to which the director is attentive. What overwhelms Messala at this point is the horror of possible ruin, not simply that of a Roman being defeated in the great arena by a Jew but his own sense of selfhood and status being undermined by the opposition of his former friend. It is a clever psychological stroke, for it takes us right back to the emotional core of the conflict (“Beg? Didn’t I beg you...?”) that has kicked off the entire tragedy. This is where it has finally led. As Pontius Pilate will pointedly observe, Messala’s action has had its way with him. To emphasize the somewhat oblique rendering of Ben-Hur’s victory, it is notice-

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able that he spends much of the final part of the race almost with his back to the finishing line, because he has turned around to see what has happened. It is an intriguing visual link to his encounter with Christ in the desert when he turns back to look at the man who has defied the Roman commander and given him water — and kept him alive for this moment in the arena when Messala’s injustice catches up with him. If the chariot race here is handled differently from its predecessors, this is even more true of the race’s aftermath which, in Wyler’s film, has no equivalent in the novel or the 1925 film. The dying Messala has sent for Ben-Hur and, in a gruesome scene for its time, fights the surgeon’s wish to amputate his legs in order to save his life. Yet this is to be no scene of reconciliation but a further turn of the screw in Ben-Hur’s mental torture. Although he has lost the race and is close to death, Messala has one last revelation up his sleeve to undercut Ben-Hur’s noble forgiveness, which might be uncomfortably close to smugness: he knows the fate of his mother and sister, whom Ben-Hur believes to be dead. “Look for them,” Messala croaks, “in the Valley of the Lepers,” adding, with evident relish, “if you can recognize them.” When Ben-Hur responds with a cry of pain, Messala can feel he is not yet vanquished. Clinging to him, Messala says: “It goes on, Judah, the race — it goes on, it’s not over....” Boyd is superb in this scene, defiant even in his agonized death-throes, still refusing to concede defeat. It is a line that is strategically shrewd, moving the film forward, past the chariot race. The crucial point that it emphasizes, however, is that, in any conflict engendered essentially by feelings of hatred and revenge, there will be no winners. When Ben-Hur leaves the tent after Messala has died, he stares across at the arena that only that afternoon was the scene of his triumph. Now it is completely empty, correlating to the hero’s sudden sense of the hollowness of his victory. It is worth looking a little more closely at what Wyler brought to the material of BenHur, and indeed what the material brought out in him. This in turns involves a brief description of how he came to be involved in the film in the first place. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of this project to M-G-M at this stage in its history — and indeed to Hollywood’s — which meant that, for the company, the right choice for director was the highest priority on its agenda. The company was in crisis and losing money for the first time in its history. Audience attendance was dwindling because of the competition of television; and consistently during the decade, studios acted on the belief that one way to combat the threat of the small screen was through the exploitation of cinematic spectacle and color that television could not match, particularly through big-screen epics, often with a biblical theme. Therefore, and after the success of Quo Vadis? (1951) earlier in the decade, M-G-M clearly thought that a remake of Ben-Hur would be a good proposition, while recognizing that it would need a director with a good box-office record and a tradition of quality that would set the film apart from others of its kind, and set the standard for others in its wake. Wyler was a Hollywood giant who had demonstrated the ability to combine artistic complexity with commercial success. He was not interested in making great films for empty houses. A composer like Stravinsky could have the artistic credo “A masterpiece is all that counts,” but it is not a philosophy that would have sustained Wyler for very long in Hollywood. Chatting at his home once to a young Steven Spielberg, Wyler told him: “Never be ashamed of making hit movies” (Yule: 115). The message was not lost on Spielberg; much of the imagery of E.T (1982) shows the influence of Ben-Hur. Still, what attracted Wyler to the project was something quite personal. Needless to say, the financial rewards were tempting: he was offered an unprecedented million-dollar fee for his services as a director. There was the challenge of making the kind of film he had

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never made before, though he was to say that he undertook to do it in spite of the spectacle rather than because of it. What particularly resonated with him about the material, however, was the struggle for freedom of the Jewish people, which he saw as a relevant modern theme. It is noteworthy that, unlike in the novel and the 1925 film, the Ben-Hur of Wyler’s film, for all his change of heart, has not converted to Christianity at the end. Even the final miracle (the cure of Miriam and Tirzah) is effected by implication, in contrast to the much more direct presentation in the silent film. In his book, The Historical Epic and Contemporary Hollywood, James Robinson comments on these aspects and makes the pertinent observation that “the film’s story resonates across many political currents, taking in the legacy of World War II, the escalation of the Cold War, and a range of other contemporary concerns” (Robinson: 33). This could be seen as part of the reason for the film’s success. It was not only a biblical spectacular but a film that also touched a number of contemporary chords. It involved an audience on an intimate and familial level with the characters, as well as with the vast historical and political canvas against which their stories move. While Wyler stresses the theme of the struggle for freedom of the Jewish people, it is intriguing that it is the Arab Sheikh, Ilderim, who asks Ben-Hur to wear the Star of David in the chariot race, “to shine out for your people and my people together and blind the eyes of Rome.” Wyler alluded to the significance of this when he accepted Hugh Griffiths’s best supporting actor Oscar on his behalf, stating his regret that the people of the United Arab Republic would not be permitted to see his performance. Nowadays the performance might seem racially inauthentic, but it is a very skillful and entertaining rendering of a small but important role, which injects real vitality and humor into the film (and there are few moments in the epics of this period that were intentionally humorous), and also broadens the film’s sympathies. There is a significant scene when the Sheikh visits the Roman compound to take bets on the chariot race. They agree on odds of 3–1, “the difference,” Messala says, “between a Roman and a Jew.” It is a moment that also occurs in the silent film, but Wyler adds a small but telling detail. After Messala’s line, a Roman soldier adds, “And an Arab,” to the laughter of his comrades, but to the clear anger of the Sheikh’s assistant. It implicitly aligns Jew and Arab against the might of Rome, and is in keeping with the film’s wit and sympathies. After the laughter subsides, the Sheikh looks around, takes note of how outnumbered he and his companion are, and observes, with withering irony, “Bravely spoken.” The friendship between Ben-Hur and the Sheikh is one of the most positive relationships in the film and, in Derek Elley’s words, “shows the film pleading for a general Middle East solidarity and an end to foreign interference rather than Zionism as a solution to the Jewish problem” (Elley: 134). The sensitivity to detail noted in the above scene is characteristic of the film as a whole. One could multiply instances of this: After his rescue at sea, Ben-Hur looks down at the galley slaves who are not so fortunate; the power of Emperor Tiberius (George Relph) is conveyed through a single gesture, the mere raising of his arm sufficient to quell the noise of the crowd; the wind picks up the leaves as a correlative to Ben-Hur’s mental turbulence as he resolves to compete against Messala in the arena; an Arab spectator joyously picks up Messala’s helmet as a trophy after the chariot race; the shot of the Sermon on the Mount, where we see Ben-Hur as a tiny figure in the background of the shot walking past from left to right, secular man too preoccupied with his own worldly woes to listen to the spiritual message that might lighten his burden. In the scene when Ben-Hur returns to his home after years away, Charlton Heston could not understand why Wyler kept asking him to repeat his entrance, but in the first take, Heston had accidentally kicked a broken pot on

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the steps and Wyler wanted to see if he would repeat it. That solitary sound added something to the scene’s texture, its hollow clatter seeming to evoke the now-forlorn and dilapidated state of the house after its former grandeur, and even causing a momentary echo of the fallen slate that had brought down the wrath of Rome on the house of Hur. It is a small touch but typically telling. As Robin Wood once remarked, “The life of a film is in its detail” (Wood: 206). Ben-Hur is the culmination of what I have referred to as Wyler’s unofficial trilogy on the themes of pacifism and revenge. It takes its hero on a journey through the morality of vengeance. Here is a man of peace who, through circumstances, is hardened into a man of hate, until a conclusion that is predicated on the purification of the innocent rather than the punishment of the guilty, and the hero’s gradual renunciation of force in favor of forgiveness. After hearing the last words of Christ on the cross, Ben-Hur tells Esther, “And I felt his voice take the sword out of my hand.” Instinctively, I link that with the conclusion of Friendly Persuasion, where Gary Cooper refuses to harm the rebel soldier who has killed his friend, and the end of The Big Country, where, as the feud dwindles to mutual destruction, the two peacemakers, Gregory Peck and Jean Simmons, exchange smiles before riding back to a situation that promises fresh beginnings. Conflict has been exhausted, the ineffectuality of violence definitively demonstrated. Collectively, the three films express, embody, and encapsulate the wisdom behind W.H. Auden’s warning, at the time of the outbreak of World War II, about the future of the human race: that we must love one another — or die.

SEVEN Revision and Renewal For directors of Wyler’s generation, who had begun their careers during the heyday of the Hollywood studio system, the 1960s was a difficult decade. The old system, under which they had mastered their craft, was now in terminal decline. Production schedules were increasingly uncertain. Audience tastes were changing in a society that was in some ways becoming more liberated but also more volatile; and critical reputations were being upended as a new generation of critics and scholars rewrote the canon according to their own lights. Against this climate, Wyler’s films were something of a mixed bunch. His output comprised a remake (The Children’s Hour); a throwback (a romantic comedy, How to Steal a Million, attempting to do for Paris what Roman Holiday had done for Rome); a musical (Funny Girl ); a dark modern love story that rehabilitated him in the eyes of some critics as a director of serious stature (The Collector); and an unexpectedly brutal depiction of race relations (The Liberation of L. B. Jones) that was to bring his career to an intriguingly troubled and uncompromising close. During this period also, Wyler missed the chance to direct a production of Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West at the New York Met (he had been invited to do so by the legendary opera house’s manager, Rudolf Bing, but was deep in preparation for The Children’s Hour and could not fit it into his schedule). He also withdrew from two films that were to win best-picture Oscars: The Sound of Music (1965), directed by Robert Wise; and Patton: Lust for Glory (1970), directed by Franklin Schaffner. Coincidentally, the same thing had happened to Wyler with How Green was My Valley, which he prepared extensively with writer Philip Dunne. The two even discovered Roddy McDowall to play the boy. When the production was delayed and Wyler had to move on to The Little Foxes, John Ford took over, and the film went on to win the Oscar for the best film of 1941. Wyler was always sorry that he had not been able to direct that picture, but he had no such regrets over relinquishing The Sound of Music, where the dramatic difficulties of combining nuns and Nazis were, to him, intractable. Nor was he sorry to decline Patton, where he suspected he might have found George C. Scott intractable. By this time also, his health was not good, and he had been deeply shocked by the death of his sister-in-law, Cathy O’Donnell, from cancer in April 1970. He was shocked again a few months later, by the death of his brother Robert from a heart attack in January 1971. Later that year Wyler decided to retire.

The Children’s Hour (aka The Loudest Whisper, 1961) “It is hard to believe that Lillian Hellman’s famous stage play The Children’s Hour could have aged into such a cultural antique in the course of three

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After the trial: Shirley MacLaine (left) and Audrey Hepburn in The Children’s Hour (1961).

decades as it looks in the new film version.... It is incredible that educated people living in an urban American community today would react as violently and cruelly to a questionable innuendo as they are made to do in this film” — Bosley Crowther “The 1961 version, despite its fidelity to Lillian Hellman’s play, is inferior to These Three” — Bernard F. Dick “His second, franker version of The Children’s Hour was a decided improvement on the first” — John Russell Taylor

There is an interesting moment in Rui Nogueira’s book-length interview with the great French director Jean-Pierre Melville when Melville praises James Garner as the great champion of underplaying in contemporary American cinema. “But he’s very bad in Wyler’s The Loudest Whisper,” suggests Nogueira, to which Melville retorts, “Nothing’s bad in that film. It’s a masterpiece. Your lack of taste appalls me!” When Nogueira suggests that the “masterpiece” is actually Wyler’s first version of the material, These Three, Melville is equally dismissive. “You’re wrong,” he says flatly. “Do you think Wyler would bother to remake a successful film? It’s because he knows he failed the first time that he made the second version” (Nogueira: 94–5).

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This exchange encapsulates the critical divide over Wyler’s film when it was first released. Nogueira was clearly unimpressed and his view was echoed so extensively by the critical fraternity that Wyler was to express regret that he had ever made the movie at all. By contrast, a fellow filmmaker, Jean-Pierre Melville, thought the film a masterpiece and a magnificent portrayal of its particular society. The fact that Wyler’s cinematic peers thought more highly of the film than the critics, incidentally, is also indicated by the fact that his direction was nominated for a Director’s Guild award and that the film was nominated for five Oscars: best supporting actress (Fay Bainter, who should have won), best black-and white photography, best costume design, best art direction, and best sound. When Nogueira expressed a preference for the first version over the second, he was reflecting a widely held view shared by Lillian Hellman herself. The play’s basic plot outline has been restored: two schoolteachers have their lives destroyed when they are accused by a malicious child of having a lesbian relationship. In the 1936 version, to appease the Production Code, the accusation had been diluted to infidelity before marriage, which never seems a big enough lie to account very credibly for the individual and social outcry that follows. In restoring the original lesbian accusation, Wyler was consciously challenging the Code, only to find that many critics thought it was, in his words, “much ado about nothing.” What must have been hurtful was that the criticism was often not just negative but condescending, suggesting that Wyler was behind the times. The influential Bosley Crowther in The New York Times (March 15, 1962) led the assault, finding the film old-fashioned and unconvincing. To a greater or lesser extent, publications such as Time, Newsweek, and The New Yorker took a similar line, while in the U.K., the British Film Institute’s Monthly Film Bulletin (September 1962: 124) dismissed it as “dead as mutton.” The highly regarded Penelope Gilliat in The Observer thought “the story emerges like a repertory melodrama” and witheringly classified it as “one of those Hollywood films that give one the feeling that they must have been made entirely in the girls’ powder room” (Tookey: 129). Perhaps worst of all for Wyler was the fact that Lillian Hellman distanced herself from the film, feeling that it should have been opened out and updated for the screen. Wyler had invited her to adapt the play herself, but a number of things intervened — her writing and teaching commitments and, not least, the death of Dashiell Hammett in 1960— to make that impossible. Hellman’s role was correspondingly reduced to that of critic and adviser on John Michael Hayes’s screenplay. How much that affected her response to the film would be difficult to say, but she cannot have been pleased by the fact that much of the animosity directed at the film was aimed at the play also, which had not been the case with These Three, that is, the film was not attacked as a bad interpretation of a masterpiece but as a film that inadvertently exposed the weaknesses of a play that now looked dated and overwrought. The early 1960s was a period when the kind of Ibsenite, well-made plays of writers such as Hellman, Arthur Miller, and Terence Rattigan were decidedly out of fashion. Nevertheless, to describe the work as a “cultural antique,” as Bosley Crowther did, was surely overstating the case, and his incredulity at the reaction of the adult community to the child’s lie in the film is itself incredible. A more recent critic, John C. Tibbetts, has described Crowther’s misgivings and Wyler’s seeming acceptance of the criticism as “misguided,” and rightly insisted that “allegations of homosexuality among teachers is indeed a volatile issue, as today’s newspaper headlines continue to attest” (Tibbetts and Welsh: 52). Although in a minority, there were critics who shared Jean-Pierre Melville’s view of the film’s mastery. The Motion Picture Herald (December 20, 1961) described it as “one

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of the most finely wrought dramas in the history of the screen.” That fine English critic, Isabel Quigly in the London Spectator, came closer than anyone else to expressing my own impression when I saw it on first release when she described the film as “cinematic,” “subtly atmospheric,” and having “some of the most intelligent, sensitive and indeed awe-inspiring acting I have seen for a long time, especially that of Shirley MacLaine” (cited in Tookey: 129). One has to allow for differences of taste that might be irreconcilable. If one critic finds it “as dead as mutton” (Tom Milne) and another finds it “very moving” (Christopher Tookey), then this might tell you more about the individual critic than the film. Still, given the scornful tone of much of the press reaction, it does seem necessary to defend the film from misrepresentation. When Caroline Latham states in her book on Audrey Hepburn that “the picture ends with Karen’s fiancé ... walking her away from the cemetery into the Hollywood sunset that suggests the eventual dawn of happiness” (Latham: 84), this is simply incorrect, a misunderstanding of a narrative detail that undercuts the author’s implied criticism of the film’s sentimentality. In fact, she walks past the waiting hero without even looking at him (à la the final shot of Carol Reed’s The Third Man [1949]). If there is to be an “eventual dawn of happiness” for Karen — and one sincerely hopes there will be — then the film makes it absolutely clear it will not involve her former fiancé. In his book Lillian Hellman in Hollywood, Bernard F. Dick offers a more eccentric reading of the ending. “Karen is no longer the stylish creature who has to be ‘kept up’ in the latest fashions,” he writes, alluding to a line early in the film. “She is wearing flats, an ill-fitting cloth-coat and a beret. The camera tracks in for a close-up of a face that has grown mannish.... Here then is the film’s one original contribution to its source: the possibility that Karen may also be a lesbian” (Dick: 82). Quite apart from his dubious stereotypical assumption about what a lesbian looks like — and I have to say that Hepburn’s face, in the film’s glorious final close-up, does not look in the least “mannish” to me — his fashion point about the heroine is bizarre. As Karen is in mourning and coming away from a funeral, one would hardly expect her to be displaying the latest in fashionable attire. Bernard F. Dick is an admirable critic and film historian, but I disagree with a number of things he says about this film in his book (acknowledging that he might himself have modified his views since, the book was published three decades ago). An odd error is forgivable (the misquoting of Karen’s last line), though it is unfortunate when he criticizes the film for unnecessarily re-distributing the famous line, “The wicked very young and the wicked very old” from Karen to Martha when it does no such thing. When he writes that “even Alex North’s score evokes These Three,” I can only reply that, for me, it does nothing of the sort. Alfred Newman’s score for the earlier film is unmemorable (Newman’s masterpiece for Wyler is Wuthering Heights), whereas North’s music for The Children’s Hour seems to me the third consecutive musical masterpiece in a Wyler film (after The Big Country and Ben-Hur) and one of the loveliest of all film scores. The fact that it has been reissued twice in recent years suggests that others feel the same. One might disagree on nuances. In an argument between Martha and Joe before the child’s accusation, Martha says, “Damn you! Leave me alone,” her response to what Dick has characterized as Joe’s attempt “to apologize for his callousness” (Dick: 45). Far from being callous, Joe at that point is trying to be conciliatory and to reassure Martha that his marriage to Karen will make no difference to the future of the school. It is precisely because of that that Martha’s vehement reaction comes as such a shock and clearly takes him by surprise. What has he done to provoke that? (She accuses him of being patronizing but the

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ferocity behind the outburst implies something deeper.) What he does not know is that Martha has just had a blazing row with her aunt, who has accused her of harboring “unnatural” feelings for Karen and is as a consequence hostile towards her fiancé. The aunt might have struck a sensitive nerve, and Martha’s residual tension will explode in a subsequent scene with Joe, suggesting that her anger at him not only has more to it than she says but more than even she might be prepared to acknowledge. John Michael Hayes adapted the play for the screen and, contrary to Dick’s opinion, it seems to me that Hayes’s deviations invariably improve on the original. He has sharpened the dialogue in places and, at crucial points, strengthened both narrative structure and character motivation. As one would expect from the screenwriter best known for four excellent screenplays for Alfred Hitchcock, he is alive to the elements of suspense in the tale. His script is also wittier than the play, notably at the expense of Martha’s aunt, Lily Mortar, an actress helping out at the school because Martha cannot support her financially in any other way. The aunt’s scenes with Martha have a comic edge that always have the potential to veer into something more serious. In an early scene in the kitchen after the Open Day, when Aunt Lily is taking an age to dry some glasses, Martha asks if she could speed up the process. “I do not aim for speed,” Aunt Lily replies with the attempted grandeur of a Sarah Bernhardt, “I aim for perfection in life.” “Well, could you perfect a few more?” asks Martha, plaintively. But the aunt cries off with a headache, and it is evident that her presence is becoming something of an irritation, particularly to Martha. In the play it is Karen who wishes Aunt Lily to go, but in the film it is Martha who is especially sensitive about her presence. It gives an extra dimension of tension to their exchanges and an additional ambiguity to Martha’s rage at her aunt’s accusations (is this another reason why she might want her to go?). It also adds a layer of irony to Karen’s comment to Martha, “You worry about her too much,” since it is Aunt Lily who sets up the chain of events that will wreck Martha’s life. “I’ve worked my fingers to the bone, to the very bone!” Aunt Lily exclaims theatrically to Martha at a later stage, when she feels she has been snubbed by Joe and Karen. Martha’s response (drolly acted by Shirley MacLaine) is to lift her glasses quizzically to inspect her aunt’s allegedly overworked fingers before returning, unimpressed, to her marking. In the published version of the play, when Martha presses her aunt to leave the school and offers her money to do so, the aunt’s response is, “I’d scrub floors first,” to which Martha answers, “I imagine you’ll change your mind.” In the film, Hayes makes Martha’s response much more cutting: “You’ll change your mind after the first floor.” Shirley MacLaine delivers the line with such pointed sarcasm and hostility that one senses it is about to precipitate something more serious, as indeed it does. Stung, the aunt will lash out at Martha with her accusations about her attitude to Joe. The argument will be overheard, and the first stages of the tragedy will be set in motion. One crucial addition made by Hayes is a scene between Aunt Lily and Mary’s grandmother, when the latter has been horrified by the child’s whispered accusation about her teachers and seeks either corroboration or denial. While she clatters about with her inexpertly packed suitcase, Aunt Lily’s thoughtless but emphatic confirmation of Mary’s use of the word “unnatural” to describe Martha’s feelings for Karen, and going on to characterize these feelings as “insane devotion,” is, unhappily, precisely the evidence Mrs. Tilford needs. In the play, when Mrs. Tilford says to Joe, “You know very well that I wouldn’t have acted until I was absolutely sure,” the line does not ring true, for there is no indication that she has made sure. In this film, the line carries much more weight and conviction, for Mrs. Tilford has been swayed not only by the fact that Aunt Lily has been dismissed from the school

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but, more particularly, by the fact that the aunt confirms what Mary has said, and that this is an adult fully aware (in a way a child might not be) of the serious implications behind the accusation. Given that additional confirmation, Mrs. Tilford would credibly feel there is no other way she could have acted. It is typically bold and imaginative of Wyler to stage this pivotal scene in a form of visual and verbal counterpoint. Mrs. Tilford’s shocked stillness is set against the near-slapstick comedy of Aunt Lily trying vainly to do something efficiently by herself (packing her suitcase). The grandmother’s earnest questioning elicits devastating disclosures that confirm her worst fears from a scatterbrained witness who seems quite oblivious to the calamity she is about to unleash, and who winds up talking to an empty chair. There is a moment in the scene when Aunt Lily walks from left to right across and out of the frame, leaving Mrs. Tilford in the background of the shot, seemingly frozen in horror at what she is hearing (a feeling underscored by the ominous chords of North’s music). It recalls a similar moment in the earlier argument between Martha and her aunt, when Martha has done the same movement and left her aunt in the background of the shot, seething with resentment, coiled, and about to spit out her retaliatory anger like a venomous snake. Miriam Hopkins is particularly fine here: In the tense, impatient tapping of her hand on the chair, one can almost feel her rising bitterness and her calculation of how she can hit back in the most hurtful way imaginable. In both examples, the simple horizontal movement of the person in the foreground of the frame, from left to right across the other’s line of vision, isolates and emphasizes the other character in her own narrow space and seems to cause something in her to snap. Another significant structural change occurs in the finale, when Hayes places Martha’s suicide after Mrs. Tilford’s disclosure of Mary’s lie and not before, as in the play; and also has Martha present when Mrs. Tilford makes her apology and offers help to compensate for the damage caused. According to Dick, this “robs the scene of its irony and makes her suicide a gratuitous action or gesture of defeat” (47). In my view, it intensifies the irony, for, after all, what would have happened if Mrs. Tilford had called before Martha’s heartbroken declaration of love for Karen? Might they have been able to continue their relationship on the same footing? The description of Martha’s suicide as “a gratuitous action or gesture of defeat” does scant justice to the sensitivity of Shirley MacLaine’s performance. (Her last look at Karen through the window is delicately accompanied by Alex North’s exquisite main theme that floats into irresolution, with dissonant chords signaling a foreboding about what is to happen.) However tragic and misguided, Martha’s suicide is an act of unconditional love, a self-denying sacrifice that will clear the way for her beloved’s new start. (And incidentally, the fact that Martha hangs herself in the film rather than shoots herself as in the play seems more plausible: it would surely be unlikely, not to say irresponsible, for a girls’ school to have a gun conveniently lying around.) By shifting the sequence of events at the end, Hayes, far from robbing the play of its irony, creatively responds to a criticism that Hellman herself had made of her play in retrospect: that the ending was too drawn-out and that the true climax should have been Martha’s suicide. Hayes’s skill as a screenwriter is evident right from the start. Rather as in his screenplay for Rear Window (1954), all the essential elements of the subsequent drama are set up in the opening ten minutes: the close friendship between the two teachers, Karen (Audrey Hepburn) and Martha (Shirley MacLaine) and the happy atmosphere at the school; the naughtiness of the child Mary (Karen Balkin) and her tormenting of her nervous friend Rosalie (Veronica Cartwright); Mary’s close relationship with her grandmother Mrs. Tilford

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(Fay Bainter); the futile fussiness of Lily Mortar (Miriam Hopkins), Martha’s aunt, who is nominally helping out at the school but seems neither useful nor ornamental. All of this is established during a school Opening Day where the girls’ parents have been invited to the school. The atmosphere seems light and happy, and indeed, Alex North’s original title music for the film was a set of variations on the children’s nursery rhyme “Skip to My-Lou,” to emphasize the air of playfulness. (When the musical theme is quoted later in the film, its use is more sinister and ironic.) It is possible that Wyler changed that because it might have set up expectations of a lighter film than is the case. Instead, we have the first statement of the beautiful main theme, at this stage without any darker orchestral colorations, but that nevertheless stops before the credits are completed. The mood changes as a quiet, rather mysterious tracking shot takes us toward the school building where we can faintly hear the sounds of a piano recital. Typically, Wyler seasons the opening with moments of humorous observation. A parent dozes off during the recital and is first embarrassed and then amused when Martha notices. Aunt Lily conducts the piano performance with a gusto that seems more distracting than helpful and will lead to a final wrong chord. Karen does her tour around the girls’ bedrooms at night, and casually taps the lid of a basket and says “All right, bedtime,” knowing without looking that one of the girls will be hiding in there (she is right). However, there are also undercurrents of tension whose significance becomes apparent later. Mary’s salacious reading matter before bed-time reinforces the idea of her unpleasant precocity. Aunt Lily’s strident uselessness at this stage is funny but might soon begin to grate; one already senses Martha’s exasperation with her. There is the slight, awkward pause when Martha describes the moment she first saw Karen and was struck by her beauty. Her words momentarily hang in the air, one example (among many) where one can see how Wyler’s dramatic instincts and his sense of timing have sharpened since These Three. The key moments of the remake are on a different level of dramatic intensity. Another example would be the moment when Karen catches Mary in her lie about where she picked the flowers for Aunt Lily when Mary arrives late for class. (In the play and in These Three, we actually see Mary take the flowers from the trash-can so we are in no doubt about her lie.) Because of Wyler’s camera placement — Mary in the foreground of the frame arranging the flowers and studiously avoiding Karen’s gaze — and Audrey Hepburn’s subtly probing repetition of the line, “Where did you get them, Mary?” the moment has much more tension than its equivalent in These Three. Mary’s repetition of her lie, even when sensing she has been found out, is designed to make one gasp. A sense of unease beneath the normality and easy informality of the opening emerges when Karen’s fiancé, Dr. Joe Cardin ( James Garner) unexpectedly turns up while Karen is upstairs settling the girls down for the night, and Martha is tidying up alone in the kitchen. Martha’s mood changes. Ostensibly, it might be because she and Karen were planning to go for a walk and Joe’s arrival ruins that plan. It expresses itself in her (arguably justified) irritation at the way Joe helps himself to some of their food and drink when he must know their resources are stretched. When she makes a sarcastic reference to this and Joe comments that she has been a little sharp with him lately, Martha seems taken aback. She stares at her reflection in a pan, and notices a blemish on her chin. “Maybe it’s me,” says Joe. “Maybe it is,” replies Martha. Wyler’s rather ominous framing of Joe, a slightly shadowy figure under the solitary light, gives the exchange some weight and leaves a feeling of disquiet. It is a significant moment not only because of subsequent narrative developments, but also because of the repetition of the word “maybe,” which is to become a big word in the latter stages

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of the film. When their relationship is in peril and Joe has to insist that he believes Karen’s denial of a lesbian relationship with Martha, Karen replies, softly, “Yes, maybe you do.” It is a lovely moment by Audrey Hepburn, who rests her cheek in Joe’s hand and imbues the tenderness of her voice with just the faintest tinge of doubt. In her confession of love for Karen, Martha will use the word “maybe” five times, as if her depression and feelings of guilt have pushed her toward a deduction about her sexual nature that may be true, but then again may not. Shirley MacLaine’s heartrending identification with Martha’s agony of confusion, torment, and self-disgust would be hard for any subsequent actress in the role to match. Although James Garner confessed that the main attraction for him of doing the film was not the role of Joe Cardin but the opportunity to be directed by Wyler, his characterization is more subtle than Joel McCrea’s in These Three. Even that most fervent champion of the earlier film, Graham Greene found McCrea’s performance slightly monotonous, albeit amiable. Garner takes more risks, even bringing the character near the point of tears and not being afraid to disclose a certain insensitivity beneath the character’s likeability and charm. The impression is that the length of his engagement to Karen (two years) might have subconsciously given rise to more doubts about her than he realizes. I am always struck by the moment when he first hears about what has happened from Karen after she and Martha have burst into Mrs. Tilford’s house, and he demands to know why his aunt has made such an outrageous accusation. “Because it’s true,” she says. At this point one might expect a reaction shot of the accused but Wyler’s first reaction shot is on Joe, who swivels around in mental turmoil, as if a seed of doubt has been planted amidst the revulsion and shock. From that moment onward — and however hard Joe tries to be steadfast and loyal to Karen — one feels that something irrevocable has happened. His frustratingly long engagement has suddenly been given a nightmarish explanation that will forever cast a shadow over their relationship. Before all this, we have a movie-only scene in Joe’s car with him and Karen, where they agree to marry. As scripted by Hayes and directed by Wyler, it is an interesting variation on a scene in These Three, where Joel McCrea’s attempt at the fair to tell Karen he loves her has been continually thwarted and put him in a bad mood. There the scene was played largely for comedy that leads to romance as Karen accepts his proposal. In the remake, the equivalent scene is more troubled. Joe’s bad mood shades into boorishness, and his mockery of Karen’s ideal of domesticity (nicely acted by Garner) is potentially, embarrassingly, hurtful. Indeed, it will be Karen who obliquely proposes to him (“Can we have a baby twelve months from now?”) and the impression is that it comes from an impulse created as a response to Joe’s mood. The impact of the decision will have massive repercussions, prompting a fierce outburst from Martha when Karen tells her about the upcoming wedding. It will awaken Mary and lead her to spy on the two as Karen leaves Martha’s room, pausing to kiss her on the cheek. Wyler’s ominous close-up of the child at this point, as the shadow from the closing door casts a diagonal darkness across her face, tells us all we need to know about what the girl’s rancid imagination could make of what she has seen. The scene in the car closes on a romantic note. The two embrace, and in close-up Karen says, “Oh, how I love you,” before whispering in Joe’s ear, “love you, love you, love you, love you.” Audrey Hepburn’s acting at that point seems so natural that one could almost feel that the moment was improvised. Yet Hayes and Wyler were probably aware of its dramatic irony, where a whispered declaration of love in a car will be contrasted and indeed displaced by Mary’s later whispered (and hateful) lie to her grandmother in her limousine.

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In this later scene — perhaps the most chilling in the film — Hayes sticks closely to Hellman’s theater dialogue, the change of setting from the grandmother’s study to the limousine in which she is returning Mary to school an ingenious touch. It adds to the sense of claustrophobia because in the limousine the grandmother cannot easily escape from the relentless insinuations of her grand-daughter, whose “motiveless malignity” (to borrow Coleridge’s phrase about Iago) begins to puncture her grandmother’s defenses. The change of setting also introduces an additional ingredient of tension: the element of time. As the limousine draws closer to the school, Mary realizes that time is running out if she is to persuade her grandmother that she is not to return. Consequently, the tempo of her accusations quickens; the insinuations become a little more extreme and outrageous. When she senses that the word “unnatural” seems to be pressing on an uncomfortable nerve, she plays that for all it is worth. As she whispers her poison into her grandmother’s ear, Wyler cuts to the front of the car so that we see the imperturbable chauffeur, unaware of the drama being played out behind the glass. The sound has dipped but abruptly rises again as the grandmother lowers the glass and shouts to the startled driver, “Stop the car!” The limousine screeches to a halt. Wyler’s gradation of the soundtrack from whisper to shout to screech becomes a kind of aural jump-cut to simulate the spread of Mary’s lie in terms of both its speed and the hysteria it generates. Karen Balkin was cast as Mary on the strength of her performance of the wicked child in a Texas production of The Bad Seed. Although she does not have the alarming diabolical intelligence that Bonita Granville brought to the role in These Three, she does make a convincing, pouting, spoiled school bully. After a decade of McCarthyism, Wyler was aware that wickedness did not necessarily need to be subtle or clever to be effective. Indeed, Mary’s unhappiness at school and her incessant mischief might stem precisely from her limited intelligence, and might make her lies more credible. As her grandmother says, “How would a child her age know of such things? She could hardly invent them.” Part of the tension of the scene in the limousine comes from the fact that Mary, in her desperation at not wanting to go back to school, seems only belatedly to pick up the significance of what Mrs. Mortar has said about Martha. When told earlier by her classmate about the argument between the two, Mary has asked, “What did she mean, unnatural?” She has clearly not said anything about any of this to her grandmother the previous evening. It is only in the limousine that Mary makes the connection that Mrs. Mortar was not talking about Martha’s jealousy of Karen but about her jealousy of Joe. Facially and vocally, Karen Balkin conveys this dawning realization extremely well, suggesting not only the girl’s alarm at the substance of the accusation but, simultaneously, her sense that this might be the opportunity she has been looking for. On seeing her grandmother’s increasing discomfiture at the word “unnatural”— rather in the way Iago senses Othello’s unease at the word “jealousy”— she presses her advantage. We have already seen how Mary, like many bullies, has the knack of spotting someone’s weak spot and probing it until it hurts. It is the gift that gives her dominion over the wretched Rosalie (finely played by Veronica Cartwright, already suggesting the accomplished adult actress she was to become). Rosalie’s theft of Helen Burton’s bracelet, which Mary has twisted from her grasp, is not an isolated aberration as she claims but part of an ongoing kleptomania. (Mary is not the only liar in the film.) Wyler’s presentation of Mary is unusually blunt, going for straightforward nastiness over nuance, and Karen Balkin delivers what he requires, particularly in her close-ups. For example, when Karen tries to make Mary admit her deception over the flowers, Audrey Hepburn plays the scene with a gentleness and humor that would have won over all but the most irredeemable of souls, so there is a real frisson

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when Mary sticks to her story, particularly when we have actually been shown her indiscretion. Karen Balkin’s unblinking glare has a genuine power, so intimidating that it forces the teacher to her feet in shock at the girl’s defiance. It would have shocked the movie audience too: Mary is the first screen character in ten years not to have fallen for Audrey Hepburn’s charm. The great confrontation scene in the grandmother’s house gives a clear indication of Wyler’s development as a director. While impressive in These Three, his direction has a new dimension of cinematic maturity in this remake. It is more fluent in structure and movement, more expressive in terms of composition, grouping and mise-en-scène, and with a surer sense of pacing and suspense. Only in the comparative performances of the two girls might The Children’s Hour yield to its predecessor, but even here the visual presentation is more imaginative. For example, Wyler builds to Rosalie’s entry very carefully, showing her changes of mood as she descends the staircase, first happy, then nervous as she notices the unexpected presence of her teachers in the house, but then even more apprehensive as Wyler switches the camera angle and Rosalie finds herself staring into the face of her nemesis, Mary, who might be about to spill the goods about her stealing. Earlier in the scene, when the grandmother imperiously commands the teachers to leave the house, as if their very presence is contaminating the atmosphere, she turns her back on them and looks out of the window. Wyler will replicate that composition later in the film, when Mary’s lie has been discovered. Just in that framing alone, he can suggest how the grandmother recalls the earlier moment and digests the full horror of what she has done. This kind of structural and visual parallelism, favored by Hayes and Wyler, and of which there are many examples in the film, might appear to some as overly schematic, but it seems to me a concise and intelligent strategy to reflect something of great importance in the film. Namely, it invites us to reflect not only on people’s actions in the drama but the consequences of those actions. When, after discovering the truth, the grandmother tells the protesting Mary to “Be still!,” one feels that the command has all the more venom behind it (and it terrifies Mary) because it recalls the same phrase that Martha had used when the child began her web of lies at her house. The grandmother’s demand resonates with all the horror of words that have come back to haunt her. If there is a primary difference in the confrontation scene in the two films, it is surely felt in the level of performance. The acting in These Three is very good; in The Children’s Hour it is, to borrow Isabel Quigly’s apt description, “awe-inspiring.” One has to concede a level of subjective impression here, but, in supporting this contention, I would particularly focus here on the performances of Shirley MacLaine as Martha and Fay Bainter as the grandmother. In These Three, Miriam Hopkins (as Martha) plays the scene effectively, and on a fairly consistent note of quiet neurosis and bewildered sincerity. Shirley MacLaine’s characterization has more physicality, variety, attack, and emotional instability, recalling the aunt’s warning about Martha’s temper. Consequently, the dramatic temperature of the scene is significantly raised. When she insists to the grandmother that the accusation “is not true, it’s just not true,” MacLaine not only gives an edge of anger to her denial but deliberately cuts across the grandmother’s path to confront her and throw the accusation back in her face. In These Three, when Martha catches Mary in her lie about seeing the guilty partners through the keyhole (“There is no keyhole on my door”), Wyler tilts the camera up toward Martha. Miriam Hopkins states the line almost calmly to the grandmother. In the remake, no special camera movement is needed for this crucial moment, for MacLaine is forceful enough to ram home the point on her own, stating the line first quietly, as recognition of

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the lie dawns, and then shouting it in the child’s ear, again as if hurling the lie back at its source. In comparison with Hopkins, MacLaine’s performance is pitched at a more demanding dramatic level, and along with her work in The Apartment, this seems to me her greatest film performance. However, it is worth adding that Miriam Hopkins’s performance as Mrs. Mortar in this version is the finest of her four Wyler performances, a fearless portrait of a selfish egotist whom life has disappointed and whose festering vindictiveness has found a terrible outlet. Like Shirley MacLaine, Fay Bainter, as the grandmother, takes the material onto another dramatic plane. Whereas in These Three, Alma Kruger suggested a kind of stubborn integrity, Fay Bainter imbues the grandmother with a blend of righteous conviction and moral indignation that is frightening to behold. When Karen tells her they have nothing left but the dirt she has made of them, the grandmother snaps back, “The dirt you have made for yourselves!” Fay Bainter delivers the line direct to the camera and it is hard to imagine how anyone could surpass the ferocious sense of outrage and revulsion she conveys. Everyone in the room is visibly taken aback. Given her overwhelming feelings of disgust at the alleged offense, the grandmother’s later discovery of Mary’s falsehood turns her not into a wicked figure but a tragic one. Her precipitous fall from the moral high ground is steep indeed, and Wyler, ever-sensitive to the dramatic use of place and space, stages it as a literal fall, taking place at that area by the door where she stood when she originally summoned Rosalie to confirm Mary’s story. At that point, Karen had said, “You deserve whatever you get, Mrs. Tilford,” to which the old lady replied quietly, “I don’t know, maybe it is what I do deserve.” That word “maybe” again. We never learn what the grandmother does when she follows the terrified Mary up the stairs (presumably to exact some form of punishment), but her look says it all. Each has become the other’s mutual hell. In all the voluminous literature on Audrey Hepburn, this film tends to be passed over when her magic and talent are discussed. Douglas McVay is one of the few critics to recognize what he calls her “greatest ‘Greek tragedy’ performance” in what he also justly asserts is a “shamefully under-praised film” (McVay: 16). Cecil Beaton once famously drew attention to the unusual quality of Hepburn’s voice that has “the quality of heartbreak in it” (Shipman: 97). In The Children’s Hour, she gives her most subtle vocal performance. Her gentle, caressing delivery of the film’s last line, “Goodbye, Martha, I’ll miss you with all my heart,” brings a lump to the throat through its almost musical tone of sadness — Hepburn was always incomparable at farewells. There are numerous other examples elsewhere. Martha is about to confess her love for Karen, who, preoccupied with her grief over Joe’s departure, is only half listening. Karen says, almost to herself, “I’m cold.” This simple line is not in the play, but as delivered by Hepburn, with her arms wrapped around herself to keep warm, it becomes not simply a statement of fact but a shiver of premonition. The quiet flat tone suddenly changes the temperature of the room. Later, after the grandmother’s visit, where she has offered reparation for the damage caused by the girl’s lies, Karen goes up to see Martha in her room. “Martha, I’m going away someplace to begin again,” she says. Martha begins to nod in resigned acceptance, before Karen adds: “Will you come with me?” It is a sublime moment and acted with such quiet beauty. Without even alluding to Martha’s confession, Karen signals her understanding and indicating it makes no difference to their friendship. It is one of the most poignant additions to the play for it allows us to appreciate Karen’s rejection of Martha’s self-condemnation and, implicitly, her absolute rejection of a bigoted society whose values have caused Martha such distress, and that are intolerant of

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difference. The irony now is that it might be the very kindness of Karen’s gesture (so sensitively acted by Hepburn) that prompts Martha to commit her ultimate act of self-sacrifice and, as it were, set her friend free. Hepburn is at her absolute finest in the scene of Martha’s suicide. In the play, Karen is almost passive at this point. By contrast, Wyler and screenwriter Hayes contrive what is arguably the dramatic highlight of Hepburn’s career. Leaving Martha to sleep in her room, Karen has walked in sunlight to the gates of the school, recalling a similar walk earlier in the film by Martha before the tragedy has struck. It offers a momentary feeling of release, one can almost feel the fresh air on one’s cheeks after the prolonged confinement indoors. Hearing Aunt Lily calling for Martha and getting no response, Karen begins to retrace her steps. Almost imperceptibly, the tension begins to grow. Wyler cuts to a Hitchcockian pointof-view panning shot as Karen looks up toward Martha’s window and senses something is wrong. She breaks into a run, her face communicating, in McVay’s phrase, “by every nuance of her expression her dawning suspicion and panic at what may have happened” (McVay: 17). Wyler maintains the tension by keeping her in close-up during the run and deploying a series of jump cuts (brilliantly edited by Robert Swink) that reflect the agitated heartbeat of someone hurtling with a sickening sense of foreboding toward the worst imaginable nightmare. When she rushes up the stairs, one might subliminally recall the similar shot of her excitedly running up the stairs to give Martha the news of her upcoming wedding. This chilling parallelism links the first stage of the drama with its tragic conclusion. As Karen tries to break down the door, Wyler cuts to a shot inside the room and to the confirmation of our fears: an overturned chair, a shadow on the wall slightly swaying. When Karen bursts in, she breaks down at what she sees and slumps to the floor moaning, “Martha... Martha...” A crescendo of panic now modulates to a diminuendo of pain. It is the most sustained and intense scene in Hepburn’s screen career, and the ultimate demonstration of her greatness not as a fashion icon but as a dramatic actress. The Children’s Hour deals with, in Oscar Wilde’s phrase, “the love that dare not speak its name.” The word “lesbian” is never used in the film, though it was never used in the play, either. Although certainly a step forward in its loosening of the Production Code’s previous censorship of explicitly homosexual themes, the film has been attacked by subsequent commentators over the years for not giving a more positive and progressive depiction of homosexual experience. For example, in their book America on Film, Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin compare the film to Otto Preminger’s contemporaneous Advise and Consent (1962), in which a young senator commits suicide when he is threatened with exposure of a past homosexual episode in his life. The authors write, “Homosexuality was understood as a tragic flaw linked to violence, crime, shame and, more often than not, suicide. At best these films called for pity and sympathy for people who could not help suffering from the ‘illness’ of homosexuality” (Benshoff and Griffin: 323). That seems to me an oversimplification. Martha’s suicide has a much more complicated motivation behind it than the simple “exposure” of her lesbianism. Moreover, the film, moreso than the play, makes its clear that Martha’s disclosure will make no difference to Karen’s devotion to her. One could hardly argue that in this film, homosexuality is “linked to violence, crime and shame,” etc. On the contrary, the relationship between Karen and Martha is the most sympathetic in the film. It is what passes for a “normal” response to their relationship that is seen unequivocally as wicked, bigoted, and cruel. And if it ends tragically, one might remember that even E. M. Forster confessed to the impossibility of writing a convincing happy ending to his overtly homosexual novel, Maurice (which, significantly, he refused to be allowed to be published

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until after his death in 1970). The social climate of morality and tolerance of the time did not, he thought, encourage such optimism. That was then, this is now? Hardly. As I write these words half a century after the film’s release, the lead story in my morning newspaper concerns a prominent politician feeling compelled to reveal intimate details of his married life to scotch rumors about a gay affair with a political aide; and an article in the Women’s Section of the same paper has the subtitle: “Why don’t we admit it is still hard to be gay?” For all the moral smugness and complacency evinced by many critics at the time of the release of The Children’s Hour, the issues raised by Wyler not only had resonance at the time but are still relevant today. The kind of innuendo, outrage, and anguish depicted in the film is not a thing of the past (would that it were). And, of course, homosexuality is not the only issue in both film and play: It is about lives destroyed through deceit, unjust accusation, collective hysteria, bigotry and intolerance. It is also about wickedness across generations, about the varieties of love, and the pressures and prejudices that can distort it or destroy it but which love can also overcome. In other words, it is a film about the human condition, superlatively acted, photographed, scored, and edited under the guidance of a great director at the height of his powers. JeanPierre Melville was right.

The Collector (1965) “I told old Willie that I wanted to make a great film and I tell you one thing, John, he’s a f***ing sight more excited about this film than I ever realized” — Terence Stamp to John Fowles

At one point in John Fowles’s first novel, The Collector (1963), the sinister clerk-hero has chloroformed his captive heroine and is carrying her upstairs to bed, prior to undressing her unconscious form in an endeavor, he says, to make her more comfortable. “I remembered an American film once,” he writes, “about a man who took a drunk girl home and put her to bed, nothing nasty, he just did that and no more, and she woke up in his pajamas” (Fowles: 95). His recollection is surely that of a scene in Roman Holiday in which Gregory Peck has behaved with perfect decorum in a similar situation with a sleeping Audrey Hepburn. It is an intriguing coincidence that the director of that film should wind up making the screen adaptation of The Collector. Whether Wyler was aware of this connection is unclear. What is certain is that his attraction to the material was very strong, compelling him to abandon the opportunity to direct The Sound of Music in favor of something that could hardly have been more different. It is possible that part of its appeal was its modernity, and that Wyler saw the project as an opportunity for a comeback. Although Ben-Hur and The Children’s Hour could hardly be classified as failures — they had clocked up a total of 17 Oscar nominations between them — Wyler’s critical reputation had suffered. This was the heyday of auteurism, and Wyler’s success helped to make him a target for iconoclastic critics determined to upend traditional wisdom about quality cinema, and in search of directors with distinctive styles and recurrent themes. Wyler might have felt that a daring subject like The Collector would connect him with a younger audience at a time of increasing sexual liberation and a relaxation of censorship regulations. It also might reconnect him with a critical fraternity that seemed to be writing him off. And, importantly for him, it would give him an opportunity to explore

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something new. In all these respects, the film was successful. It earned generally good reviews, even from the likes of Andrew Sarris, who had been an influential voice in the campaign against Wyler. The director was nominated for an Oscar, and Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar were voted best actor and best actress (a unique double at that time) at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival. In an interview in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner (May 31, 1964), Wyler said that “this picture is going to enable me to portray two characters I had never seen on the screen before.” After the film’s release the following year, he told Hedda Hopper that “I prefer change. I’ve never specialized in one type of film, and I’ve never made something because the theme had succeeded for me before. I like to be so compelled by a property that I must make it; the closer one comes to obsession with a story, the better” (Chicago Tribune, December 5, 1965). It is presumably better still when the story itself is about obsession. Wyler told Terence Stamp that he was going to make “a modern love story” (Stamp: 203). The Collector goes into very dark areas indeed, both physically and psychologically, but the core of it is still a love story, albeit a very disturbing one. The film takes some liberties with the novel. It has eliminated the book’s more overt literary allusions, particularly the insistent analogy with Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which a modern-day Caliban finally corners Miranda. The book’s structural similarity to Dickens’s Great Expectations, where a lowly hero unexpectedly comes into wealth and thinks it will enable him to win the heart of the woman he loves, is also downplayed. The film fits more into the contemporary cinematic vein of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), that is, a psychological study of abnormality in a confined setting. One of the fascinations of the novel is the way the story is told. The first section is seen from the point of view of the male character until nearly the end of the narrative. Then the same events are related from the captive woman’s point of view, before a return to the hero’s perspective to take us through the tragic finale. Stanley Mann and Jud Kinberg’s skillful adaptation simplifies the structure and allows the story to unfold chronologically. The heroine’s backstory — details of her family background and particularly her relationship with an older art professor whom she deeply admires — is cut entirely. This gave Wyler the unenviable task of having to inform actor Kenneth More (who originally appeared in flashback scenes with Samantha Eggar) that his scenes had been dropped because they diminished the sense of claustrophobia and slowed the narrative. It was a controversial decision because it took away some of the complexity of the characterization of the heroine; the only flashback now shows the hero suffering his workmates’ taunts about his butterfly hobby. (The sequence is shot in black-and-white, as if to mark a sharp distinction between that period and his new life.) The emphasis in the film is thrown fully on the dark romance between two young people. Part of the appeal of this risky material, one suspects, was the dramatic challenge. Could Wyler sustain the suspense and narrative momentum of a story that essentially consists of two people in a room? Freddie Clegg (Terence Stamp) is a lowly bank clerk who collects butterflies. Suddenly, a huge win on the football pools enables him to dream up a disturbing human extension of his hobby, namely, the capture of a young art student, Miranda Grey (Samantha Eggar), whom he has adored from afar, and whom he plans to lock away in the cellar of his remote new house for closer study. Perhaps enforced proximity will blossom into love. Wyler films the stalking of the prey with typical precision, the girl’s freedom of movement suddenly proscribed as she walks down a narrow alley blocked by Freddie’s van. The hunter strikes. The film develops into a battle of wills and wits between the two, as Miranda tries to escape

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but also tries to penetrate the psychology of her captor, whose motives are not ransom or rape, but a twisted kind of infatuation. Although screen tested for the role in scenes supervised by director Robert Parrish, Terence Stamp was Wyler’s first and only choice for the part of the collector, who is a peculiar mixture of pervert and puritan. At that time, Stamp was best known for his performance in the title role of Peter Ustinov’s Billy Budd (1962), though he had also made an impression as a young delinquent in Peter Glenville’s Term of Trial (1962). It might be that Wyler felt that the contrast between the two roles — the former representing pure innocence, the latter pure mischief— suggested that Stamp was well equipped to convey the duality of his main character (sinister maneuverings behind a gentle manner) that would keep the heroine and the audience constantly off-guard. Stamp and Wyler seem to have hit it off instantly, with Stamp, aware of Wyler’s intimidating reputation, nonetheless charmed by Wyler’s “tender eyes in a grizzled face” (Stamp: 103). Stamp would particularly recall Wyler’s one piece of direction in the flashback scene, where he simply said to him, “the taste of the stamps,” giving the actor all he needed to convey in his surly and downcast expression his distaste for his job, and the mockery of his colleagues. Physically, the performance is appropriately disconcerting. At times Freddie moves stiffly, in a manner that recalls Boris Karloff ’s monster in Frankenstein; but he also has odd jumps of joy, as if a coiled spring has been released. “If there is anything truly terrifying about this character,” wrote Andrew Sarris in his Village Voice review ( June 24, 1965), “it is that his voice and face don’t match.” Although the voice is mainly quiet and relatively toneless (he raises it only twice in the entire film), the facial expression can shade into cruelty and menace. Wyler is not slow to emphasize this visually in key contexts: for example, the shadow that falls across Freddie’s face when he mentions “that chap” he has seen in the pub with Miranda; or the way the camera moves in for a close-up when he reacts to Miranda’s unexpected acceptance of his proposal of marriage, as if recognizing that any agreed union between them only shows up her attempt to deceive him, and that she has fallen into a trap of his making (“Don’t you think I know you need witnesses to get married?”). An early indication of this duality of personality occurs when Freddie first appears before the heroine in the cellar. The camera focuses on his legs as he descends the steps, as if delaying the horror of his appearance. But when the camera tilts up, he is smartly dressed and carrying a tray of food. Miranda has been expecting to confront a monster but instead confronts a butler. The confusion is increased when she questions him about his motives for the kidnapping and, having dismissed any possibility of financial gain from ransom, assumes the motive must be sex. “It’s not that at all,” he protests, “I shall have all the proper respect.” Samantha Eggar’s expression at this point is marvelous, momentary relief giving way to total puzzlement about what she is dealing with. (The audience has had a similar sensation slightly earlier, when Clegg decorously pulls Miranda’s skirt down over her knees, as if protective of her modesty, after rendering her unconscious.) Part of Miranda’s problem is that she never does get a handle on Freddie’s psychology and therefore never finds a strategy to combat or defeat it. If he were a straightforward sexual psychopath, it might be easier. He is quite hurt when she implies he might be mad. “Think a madman would have gone to all this trouble?” he retorts. There are two scenes where his façade slips a little and we get a closer insight into his character. The first occurs when he shows Miranda his butterfly collection. The impression is given that, through this elaborate display of his hobby, he wants to impress Miranda with his appreciation of beauty. Instead, she sees it as a display of death, and when her reflection

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appears on the glass panel of one of the butterfly cages, she makes the connection between his hobby and her situation. “And now you’ve collected me,” she says. In desperation she attempts to free the live butterfly but Freddie angrily prevents her, an action which, in a way, foretells the outcome of the story. It is the first display of real anger he has so far shown in a scene where the symbolism is effective if not particularly subtle. The second occasion is, psychologically, perhaps the most interesting scene in the film, where, on the surface, a sullen, philistine hero and snooty heroine lock horns over the merits and demerits of Salinger and Picasso. Both characters are seen at their most conflicted and sympathetic. Miranda has been taunting Freddie about his literary and cultural ignorance and suggested that he reads Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. On the morning of the day when she is due to be freed, they get into an argument about the merits of the book. This becomes not only a literary disagreement but a measure of the unbridgeable cultural gulf between the two. The suspense comes not only from the intensity of the disagreement itself but from Miranda’s fear that an argument between them could lead to a change of mind on Freddie’s part, which is the last thing she wants. Samantha Eggar is superb here, trying to keep her fear under control as she attempts to pacify him without making things worse by seeming patronizing, and tries to engage him in a proper discussion without making him feeling inferior. Neither strategy works. Freddie particularly bridles at the suggestion that Salinger’s hero, in his dislocation from the society around him, might actually be a bit like himself. Stamp is equally fine at conveying the character’s rising anger borne out of humiliation. When Miranda says he has not grasped what the author has attempted to express, he shouts, “Well, how do I grasp it?,” ripping at the novel’s cover in frustration and then furiously tearing up the cover of her book on Picasso, whose Cubist style is to him equally unfathomable. The scene has no precise equivalent in the novel and seems to me the one in which Wyler’s personality comes through most strongly, because the social gulf and the complexity of sympathies we feel for both characters are at their most intense here. For all the freedom that money has given Freddie to set up this situation, the one thing it cannot buy is the sort of education and knowledge that would secure entry into Miranda’s world and connect him emotionally with her. For all that he has imprisoned the girl of his dreams in a perverted conviction that she might learn to love him, in the last resort, he is as much a prisoner as she is because of his social and cultural limitations. His anger in this scene recalls that of Heathcliff ’s in Wuthering Heights, who despises the Lintons’ world, of which he could never be a part, and which has taken Cathy from him; and even recalls the social as well as sexual rage of Buck Hannassey in The Big Country, who assaults the schoolteacher he desires but who belongs to a different, unattainable world. What is truly unsettling is the conclusion that Freddie will draw from all this. A sane person in his position might acknowledge the impossibility of any sort of union with Miranda and call an end to the relationship while readjusting his expectations accordingly. But for him, awareness becomes a weird vindication of what he has done. “You see,” he says, “I was right to bring you here. We could never be friends outside.” The phrase “You see” is particularly chilling: it is an invitation to share and agree with his perverse logic. The role of Miranda might appear to be less challenging than Freddie, since all we learn of her is that she is a bright and vivacious art student unexpectedly trapped in a nightmarish situation from which a sympathetic audience hopes she can escape. Yet it is a role that demands considerable dramatic resources. The character has to express infinite nuances of fear, anxiety, and apprehension as she is subjected to varieties of physical and sexual

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threat, as well as what one might call prolonged psychological terrorism, from her unpredictable and inscrutable captor. It is also a role of considerable physical discomfort, involving nudity, her hands being bound, being tied to a bathroom pipe, and then gagged at one stage to prevent her from crying out for help. After her last ill-fated attempt at escape, she is dragged backwards through wet grass. In the first volume of his Journals, John Fowles was very rude about Samantha Eggar’s performance during the early stages of filming, and there was talk of replacing her with another actress (Natalie Wood, Yvette Mimieux, Sarah Miles, Susannah York, and Julie Christie were all considered). Wyler stayed with the original choice, bringing in that fine American character actress, Kathleen Freeman, to assist as dramatic coach. Wyler deliberately isolated Eggar from Stamp and the rest of the crew in a strategy designed to assist her characterization. Tough tactics, undoubtedly, but they worked. Eggar delivered the performance of her career and one that earned her one of the film’s three Oscar nominations (the others were for direction and adapted screenplay). She was probably helped in developing the part because most of the film was shot in sequence. Eggar’s performance grows in stature and variety as the narrative proceeds. It is full of sensitive and observant detail. One thinks of the moment when she closes her eyes, both in fear and in prayer, as Freddie inspects the sealed letter to her parents that he has dictated, rightly suspecting there might be a message hidden inside; or her shy twirl in the dress he has bought her, happy in the thought that this will be their last night together and not realizing that her beauty will make it that much harder for him to part with her; or her gasp when she reaches for the food he has provided for her farewell meal and finds instead an engagement ring — like the last move in a deadly game of chess where her opponent has secured checkmate with a move she had not seen coming. The slow process by which vitality is drained from her by a repressed and impotent Dracula is truly shocking, and Eggar makes something powerfully, if perversely, poignant out of Miranda’s delirious last moments. For the first time, the captive is happy to see her captor. By the end, the actress is surely giving everything that the director could have wished for. Wyler insisted on retaining the novel’s bleak ending, “otherwise,” he told Variety ( June 3, 1964), “it would be like any other melodrama, with the Marines coming to the rescue.” So, after Miranda has died and Freddie has buried her body under the oak tree, he prepares to move onto his next victim, a young nurse who seems more on his social level. The collector is becoming a serial stalker. The avoidance of cliché is commendable, yet, although Wyler has never shied away from unhappy endings if the drama demands it (one thinks of Carrie and even Roman Holiday), there is something unsatisfying about this one. There is no real resolution in the main relationship, no emotional payoff, so the young woman’s death seems ultimately meaningless and sadistic. There are other elements of the film that do not work for me, either. A scene with an unexpected caller has the potential to be a classic suspense set piece, as the bound and gagged Miranda tries to alert the visitor to her presence in the bathroom by turning on the bath tap with her toe to flood the room. But the scene falls curiously flat, not helped by Maurice Dallimore’s somewhat caricatured rendering of a poorly written part. In choosing Maurice Jarre as his composer, Wyler might have had in mind not so much the epic composer of Lawrence of Arabia (1962) but the man capable of supplying the sinister background to a film like Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1959). John Fowles, however, thought the score “too whimsical” and he had a point. The film needed a Bernard Herrmann to infuse the narrative with atmosphere and get behind the psychology of the characters. It is customary to say of The Collector film that it “went a bit Hollywood,” though

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Andrew Sarris welcomed that (who would want to look at two unglamorous characters for two hours?), and Wyler always disliked the use of “Hollywood” as an adjective. Certainly, the English ambience of the novel is diluted (it looks no more authentically English than Mrs. Miniver), as is Fowles’s critique of the economically redeemed but spiritually impoverished proletariat of 1960s’ Britain, represented by the collector of the title. The film is the absolute antithesis of the “Swingin’ Britain” of the day, and would have made an odd contrast to Richard Lester’s The Knack (1965), whose exuberance, optimism, and sense of sexual liberation are the absolute antithesis of the gloom and repression of The Collector. (The Knack won the Golden Palm at Cannes.) Wyler’s collector seems conceived essentially as a dramatically compelling weirdo rather than a sinister social symptom. “Almost a love story” was the heading on the posters. We have already seen that Wyler thought that anything could be told through a love story, and there is enough in The Collector, particularly in its themes of class and unrequited love, to explain his fascination with the material. At the same time, there does seem to be something of a mismatch between Wyler’s habitual humanism and Fowles’s nihilism that sometimes shades into nastiness. Wyler also might have been a little advanced in years to get worked up over the sexual obsessions of the young. His characteristic discretion sometimes seems at odds with the sleaziness of the material. Rather like Hitchcock with Psycho, Wyler is making an endeavor to connect with a younger cinema audience already attuned to the flamboyance of the Nouvelle Vague. (In a self-referential flourish that the French would notice, Wyler even has the heroine walk past a cinema showing Ben-Hur.) The Collector is intelligently filmed, with a fine set that unnervingly combines the features of a furnished flat and a monster’s lair and is very eloquent about the two characters: a grotesque materialization of the man’s fantasies about the woman. (Wyler has always exhibited a Viscontian sensitivity to sets that tell you a lot about the characters who inhabit them.) Although The Collector is one of his least appealing films, it is nevertheless gripping. It secured Wyler some of his best reviews in a decade, put him back in critical contention with the likes of Sarris and Cahiers du Cinema, and made him a force to be reckoned with in contemporary cinema. He never regretted choosing this project over The Sound of Music.

How to Steal a Million (1966) “Thank heaven for the criminal class!”— Hugh Griffith in How to Steal a Million “You don’t think I’d steal something that didn’t belong to me, do you?”— Audrey Hepburn in How to Steal a Million

How to Steal a Million is a romantic fantasy with a touch of larceny, roughly contemporaneous with light caper movies such as Jules Dassin’s Topkapi (1965) and Ronald Neame’s Gambit (1966), and with luscious European locations that recall other popular movies of the time, such as Blake Edwards’s The Pink Panther (1963) and Stanley Donen’s Charade (1963). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that critics tended to dismiss the film as derivative and dated. Certainly, its stylistic restraint and sexual decorousness seemed to owe more to the tradition of Lubitsch in his Trouble in Paradise (1932) vein than to an era of permissiveness and the erotic high jinks of, say, What’s New, Pussycat (1965). When Bonnet (Hugh Griffith) asks his daughter Nicole (Audrey Hepburn) whether the tall, good-looking burglar (Peter O’Toole) she has disturbed has molested her, she replies, with a hint of disappointment:

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“Not much.” Nevertheless, from a later vantage point, it is possible to argue that the film is more knowing and artistically modern — even postmodern — in its outlook than was apparent at the time. I also think that, in contrast to the raunchy raucousness of much contemporary screen comedy, How to Steal a Million —to borrow a Sam Goldwynism — has “warmth and charmth.” The film is based on “Venus Rising,” a short story by George Bradshaw, a writer who had also provided the story that formed the basis of Vincente Minnelli’s classic insider’s view of Hollywood, The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). After withdrawing from The Sound of Music, Wyler was offered the project as an alternative by Twentieth Century–Fox and he accepted, partly because of the opportunity to film in Paris locations and also because of the opportunity to work again with one of his favorite actresses, Audrey Hepburn. It was his first comedy in over a decade. In the words of Variety ( July 13, 1966), it was a return for Wyler “to the enchanting province of Roman Holiday” and similarly “advantageous of actual story locale to give unusual visual interest.” He certainly takes advantage of his Panavision camera to give the occasional majestic panoramic view of the city, but the enchantment is a little more sedate than before, and the use of décor and locale in the film is less visually impressive than humorously ironic. This culminates in a moment when the heroine looks fondly around the inside of a broom closet, which has more romantic resonance for her than the Ritz. Audrey Hepburn plays Nicole Bonnet, who has teamed up with a society burglar, Simon Dermott (Peter O’Toole), to enter a Paris museum and steal an artistic masterwork, a miniature sculpture of Venus by Benvenuto Cellini. However, the masterpiece is not what it seems, actually having been sculpted by Nicole’s grandfather and put on display by her father, who is himself a master forger but who is now in danger of exposure because of a technical inspection demanded for purposes of insurance: hence Nicole’s desire to steal the sculpture before the inspection can take place. However, if the masterpiece is not what is seems, nor is the society burglar. We learn at an early stage that, unbeknown to Nicole, he is actually an expert in art forgery who has been on Bonnet’s trail for some time. Why, then, does he go through with the robbery? Nicole asks the same question. A kiss is her reply. In the general spirit of disguise, Wyler offers genial thematic and stylistic impersonations of Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock. The plot ingredients seem almost an affectionate homage to Wilder, what with Audrey Hepburn surrounding herself in the Parisian romantic aura, as she had in Wilder’s Sabrina (1954) and Love in the Afternoon (1957), and with a romance that begins in deception and ends in love. The screenplay is by Harry Kurnitz, who co-authored with Wilder one of that director’s most elaborate narratives of deception and disguise, Witness for the Prosecution (1957). Kurnitz even inserts a line in this film that sounds like an oblique nod to Wilder, when Nicole grumbles about Dermott’s marathon walk as he tries to figure out how to defeat the museum’s security system. “Is this how you normally work, by the mile?” she moans, and one thinks fleetingly of the doctor’s complaint in Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) after he and Jack Lemmon have rescued Shirley Maclaine from suicide by keeping her awake with enforced pacing across the apartment: “I ought to charge you by the mile.” Hitchcock is amusingly invoked when Nicole is disturbed from her nighttime reading of one of his anthologies of suspense stories and sneaks downstairs to find a society burglar in dinner jacket and bow tie who might have stepped out of the glossy frames of To Catch a Thief (1955). Peter O’Toole even offers an impression of Humphrey Bogart (“How do you like being a gangster’s moll, baby?”). It is terrible, but that is the point.

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Without rising to the romantic heights of Roman Holiday, How to Steal a Million has a lot of facets to admire. Alexander Trauner’s luxurious design and Charles Lang’s rich color photography are visual pleasures. A constant delight is the score by John — or Johnny, as he was called on the credits then — Williams, which has a Gallic dash reminiscent of Ibert or Poulenc, with exuberant moments of slapstick (for example, during the chaos that ensues in the gallery when the theft is first noticed). There is deft comic scoring, notably in the tinkling Saint-Saens-like piano theme that accompanies the hero’s experiments with his boomerang, and the bass drum that greets the news of the technical inspection of the statue, and seems like the sound of Bonnet’s heart sinking to his boots. By all accounts, the collaboration between composer and director was very harmonious, Williams describing Wyler as a “fabulous director” and regarding this as his first major film score. (For soundtrack aficionados, it might be worth noting that Williams was a member of the studio orchestra [on piano] when Jerome Moross recorded his classic score for The Big Country.) At 123 minutes, the film is long for a light comedy. Kurnitz’s screenplay is well crafted as well as witty, with the plot revelations neatly disclosed at the right moment, and where each object seems to find its proper place in the narrative — from the Van Gogh forgery that brings hero and heroine together; to the wine bottle that is a guard’s secret tipple, but which will impudently stand in for the priceless statuette; and to the millionaire’s engagement ring, which will wind up displayed on a priceless object he has acquired but can never display. The French guards are lightly amusing more than outrageously funny, though Jacques Marin as their chief does a superb reaction shot of disbelief intermingled with panic when he first sees that the Cellini Venus is missing. The special guest appearance by Charles Boyer is pleasant without seeming essential; and more comedy should have been generated from the characterization of the art collector Davis Leland (Eli Wallach). He is the butt of one of the film’s best visual jokes when he thinks he has spotted Nicole but walks straight into her mirror reflection; nothing more tellingly illustrates the man’s capacity for mistaking appearance for reality. Wallach’s best moment occurs when Nicole impulsively kisses him after realizing that he does not suspect her father as a fraudster and actually wants the Venus. His startled reaction (“You kissed me!”) is actually more touching than amusing, as if this is something that has never happened to him before. Prior to this, his most lavish compliment has been to tell Nicole that, when speaking to her, he feels like he is speaking to a member of the Board. Wallach is an excellent actor but the role needs someone more flamboyant, to give the film a shot in the arm. George C. Scott perhaps? He had originally been cast but when he was late for his first day’s shooting and then exited the set without the director’s consent, Wyler promptly fired him, reasoning that a recurrence of such behavior could jeopardize the whole film. (And Wyler no doubt felt that he was too old and too eminent to tolerate such aggravation.) Like Scott at this time, Hugh Griffith had problems with alcohol, but under Wyler’s direction once again (after his Oscar-winning performance in Ben-Hur), he delivers an endearing performance as Bonnet, ensuring that we see him as more rascal than rogue. He is particularly good in the scene where he has to feign anguish at the theft of the sculpture when he is secretly delighted because his fraud will remain undiscovered. When a sympathetic reporter asks whether he is offering a reward for the statue’s return, Bonnet roars “No!” in absolute horror, and then has to readjust hastily as he recognizes the inappropriateness of the response. Critics tended to be divided over the pairing of Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole as the romantic leads. Those who ungallantly suggested that, at 37, Miss Hepburn might be getting a little old for the role of romantic innocent might subconsciously have been

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reacting to an unusual aspect of the casting: namely that, for the first time, her romantic screen partner was younger than she was. (Previously, she had specialized in melting the hearts of some of Hollywood’s most eminent senior citizens: Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, and Rex Harrison.) She is an exquisite comedienne on film, with a delightful vocal range (as when she stretches the word “marvelous” into a whispered aria of love), a way with physical comedy (as in the moment when she pulls her father’s beard so hard to get his attention that some hairs drop into his drink), and a ballerina’s grace for moments of extrovert comedy, particularly her reaction when the gun she has been inexpertly holding suddenly goes off and her shock takes her halfway up the stairs. Peter O’Toole has that element of whimsy and madness in his screen persona that adds probability to his characterization of a man who gets sucked into a harebrained scheme against his better judgment. His languid charm combines with an imaginative vocal intonation that consistently nails the humor, sometimes in unexpected ways, like his conspiratorial “I’m in” when the heroine suggests collaborating on a burglary, which is quickly followed by a high-pitched “I’m out!” when he learns what it is she plans to steal. Wyler always loved working with British actors, and was rewarded here. During the planning of the theft, and as a key element of his plan, Dermott instructs Nicole to dress in the outfit he has provided for her: that of a charwoman. “Oh, that’s nice, that’s really nice,” he says when he sees her. “What is?” she asks, dubiously. “For one thing,” he replies, “it gives Givenchy a night off.” It is a cheeky, even postmodern line, deftly tossed off by an iconoclastic modern star like O’Toole (it would not have sounded quite right in the mouth of Cary Grant, say) and clearly directed not simply at Nicole but also at the actress playing her. Audrey Hepburn has often been something of a tomboy in her films as well as the height of style and here she has, with typical good nature, collaborated with Wyler to poke fun at her own screen image as a fashion icon. Her first appearance alerts us to that: Her sun-glasses are so outrageous that the subsequent visual revelation of her modest car is a distinct anticlimax. When she wears her Givenchy outfit during her assignation with O’Toole in the Ritz, he does not immediately recognize her, but he purrs in satisfaction when she first appears as a cleaner. It is My Fair Lady in reverse. Quite a lot of the film’s humor comes from this kind of paradox or upturning of expectation. Bonnet’s father tends to react to insults as if they were compliments. Characters nod yes when they mean no, and vice-versa. Nicole can never quite remember the right way around her (short-lived) fiancé’s name: is he David Leland or Leland David? Within that structure, there is a certain logic, then, in the heroine finding the Ritz Hotel a less memorable setting for love than a broom closet. Of equal comic perversity is Bonnet’s exclamation, “Thank heaven for the criminal class!” when it appears that the theft of the Cellini Venus has let him off the hook. It is a film about forgery and burglary, but intriguingly without criminal intent or victims. Bonnet’s forgery of countless great masterpieces and his selling and displaying of them to private collectors and art galleries anticipate the exposure of the real-life forger, Elmyr de Hory, who was imprisoned in Ibiza in 1968 for doing precisely what Bonnet is doing in Wyler’s film. De Hory’s fame and notoriety were particularly enhanced by the biography of his life, Fake! (1969), written by Clifford Irving, who was then also to be exposed as a fraud for his fake biography of Howard Hughes. Cineastes will know that the whole story provides the framework for Orson Welles’s cine-essay, F for Fake (1973), which raises some of the issues that have already been raised in a humorous vein by Wyler. Are Bonnet’s activities a crime or a joke? As he argues to Nicole, whom has he harmed?

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His buyers are millionaires who can afford it and who would not be able to distinguish between the real thing and its copy anyway (one recalls again the appropriateness of the mirror joke at the American collector’s expense). As Welles says in F for Fake, there would be no fakers if there were no so-called experts to be taken in. And moving on to another point, Welles wonders whether, in a world where fortunes are paid merely for a signature, we should be less concerned with artists and more concerned with the art itself. After all, the fact that Chartres Cathedral is a triumph of collaboration rather than of individual artistry does not diminish its artistic grandeur. Bonnet makes a similar point to his daughter, grumbling that it is working with Americans that has created her obsession with brand names and labels. It would not take a lot of ingenuity to apply all this to the film industry. Surely it is the art that matters and not the artist. Under the guise of a romantic comedy, I wonder if Wyler, with a chuckle, was permitting himself a wry little dig at the auteur theory.

Funny Girl (1968) “OMAR SHARIF KISSES BARBRA — EGYPT ANGRY”— Newspaper headline “Egypt angry?! You should have heard what my Aunt Sarah said!”— Barbra Streisand

Funny Girl brings together Wyler’s fondness for the stage and his fascination with the temperamental people who make it their home. The basic storyline — the early career of vaudeville star singer and comedienne Fanny Brice — did not particularly interest him, for it was a conventional rags-to-riches backstage theatrical tale, with a hint of A Star Is Born when the heroine’s rising fortunes are contrasted with the decline of those of her husband, Nicky Arnstein (Omar Sharif ). However, the class theme might have intrigued Wyler, as this is the story of someone from the Lower East Side of New York who is introduced to the finer things of life by a dashing gambler with an allure of affluence and style. The seductive shine is to pall, however, and ironically, in one of the most powerful scenes in the film, the word “class” is to become a barrier between them. Hugely in debt, Arnstein is offered a partnership in a new gambling casino, because, he is told, he has “class,” and the word makes him suspicious (he is alerted also by Fanny’s uncharacteristic silence). “Class” is now the only capital Arnstein can offer — the hard cash is being put up by Fanny — and Arnstein rejects the offer as “too generous.” To accept would be akin to taking charity, losing his selfrespect, and acknowledging the observation of a man he hates that Fanny has become his “meal ticket.” His moral descent from this point has echoes of Hurstwood in Carrie. As in that film, the final meeting between the two main characters will take place in the heroine’s dressing room, with her star ascendant and the hero a broken man. Whether these characteristics and parallels were apparent to Wyler at the time is open to question. He always said one of his main motives for doing the film was simply that he had never done a musical. He was ever-anxious to try new things and avoid being typecast as a director. Following the damage to his hearing during the war, Wyler understandably felt that a musical might be one genre beyond his sphere, but when producer Ray Stark and Barbra Streisand were looking for a director who could handle the dramatic elements of the material and draw a movie performance from its new star, Wyler was persuaded to take the challenge. As he reasoned at the time, “If Beethoven could write his Eroica Symphony when stone-deaf, then Wyler can attempt a musical.”

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The other powerful motive for doing the film was Barbra Streisand in the role of the great musical star, Fanny Brice. She had triumphed with Funny Girl on the Broadway and London stage, and producer Ray Stark, who was Fanny Brice’s son-in-law (he had married Frances, the child of Fanny and her husband, Nicky Arnstein), had always intended that the stage success would be followed by an equal triumph on film. After Sidney Lumet withdrew from the project because of “creative differences” with the producer, Wyler had seen and met Streisand during the Broadway run of the play. He became excited at the prospect, rather as he had with Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, of guiding a star-making performance from someone comparatively new to film audiences. He also sensed in Streisand the same kind of dedication, determination, and perfectionism that he had so admired in Bette Davis. It just needed to be controlled and toned down for the movie camera. Rumors about conflict between star and director were fantasies dreamed up by publicists. Observers close to the film saw instead two strong-willed personalities working hard to get the best out of the material and each other. To a considerable degree, they succeeded. The film was a huge commercial success at a time when the popularity of musicals was waning and several big productions of the late 1960s —Dr. Doolittle (1967), Star! (1968), Finian’s Rainbow (1968), Sweet Charity (1969)— had failed or were to fail at the box office. It also earned Barbra Streisand an Oscar, which she shared that year with Katharine Hepburn for her performance in The Lion in Winter. This was the fourteenth Oscar-winning performance in a Wyler picture, which is, by some distance, an Academy record. It was well-deserved also, not only recognition of Streisand’s vocal powers but of her prowess as a wisecracking heroine rarely seen on the Hollywood screen since the early 1940s. Harder to cast than the role of Fanny Brice was that of her gambler-husband, Nicky Arnstein, who comes to resent being in her shadow. (Wyler did say that he could empathize to some degree with that character, having felt the junior partner in his short-lived marriage to Margaret Sullavan.) Frank Sinatra had been considered for the role and both Gregory Peck and Marlon Brando had turned it down. Omar Sharif told me he landed the part almost by accident. On a seven-year contract with Columbia Pictures, he was a regular visitor to the studio cafeteria (where he had met Wyler) and had also already featured prominently in the movies of three of Wyler’s closest film friends — David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Fred Zinnemann’s Behold a Pale Horse (1964), and Anatole Litvak’s Night of the Generals (1966). One day, when the subject of who was to play Arnstein came up, someone joked, “Why not Omar Sharif?,” to which Wyler, after a thoughtful pause, replied, “Why not Omar Sharif?” After all, the role essentially required someone who would look the part of an elegant gambler in dinner jacket and ruffled shirt and who could credibly sweep the heroine off her feet (which Sharif accomplished both on and off-screen, apparently). In those circumstances, ethnic authenticity seemed beside the point. The casting proved controversial when the Arab-Israeli conflict erupted in 1967 and precipitated the kind of headlines quoted in this chapter’s epigraph. Some pressure was put on Wyler to reconsider the casting in the light of the political situation, but he thought that was ridiculous, and the controversy subsided as abruptly as the war itself. In what was anyway a secondary role, Sharif proved a capable and effective choice. Two other stipulations needed to be agreed to before Wyler’s appointment as director was confirmed. He insisted that the musical numbers be assigned to an experienced choreographer, and Ray Stark wisely chose Herbert Ross, who had done distinguished work in that capacity on recent films such as Robert Mulligan’s hugely underrated Inside Daisy Clover (1966) and Richard Fleischer’s Doctor Doolittle. Ross had worked with Streisand before,

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and was soon to embark on a successful directing career himself. (Appropriately enough, he was to direct the sequel, Funny Lady, in 1974.) The other proviso was a strict schedule and closing date, for at that time Wyler was heavily involved in pre-production for Patton. In the event, he was to withdraw from that project, feeling that an arduous location shoot in Spain, not to mention the prospect of directing George C. Scott (whom he had fired from How to Steal a Million) might put too much of a strain on his less than robust health. The picture was taken over, to deserved Oscar-winning effect, by Franklin G. Schaffner. Apart from the classics “People” and “Don’t Rain on my Parade,” it would be fair to say that Funny Girl (lyrics by Bob Merrill) is not one of the strongest scores of the great songwriter Jule Styne, and it is significant that, without the charisma of a Streisand going for it, the show seems rarely to have been revived, though it ran for a total of 1,348 performances after it opened on Broadway in April 1964. (It does, however, have the benefit of a witty script by Isobel Lennart.) Only seven of the play’s original sixteen songs were retained for the film, though this was a less drastic reduction than Billy Wilder’s solution to the problem of filming the musical numbers of Irma la Douce (1963): He cut them all out. The film version of Funny Girl actually adds three new numbers, which are strategically placed. They relate to or exploit Streisand’s performing persona within the context of the film, or are songs particularly associated with Fanny Brice’s actual musical career. In the film, Fanny’s first solo as a singer, “I’d Rather be Blue,” occurs after she has hilariously disrupted a roller-skating routine and has been encouraged by a stagehand, Eddie (Lee Adams), who has befriended her, to take advantage of the audience’s good humor and sing them a song. It is a significant moment in two ways. It reaffirms Eddie’s conviction about Fanny’s talent as comedienne and singer rather than dancer; and the sentiments of the song seem a premonition of her forthcoming relationship with Nicky Arnstein, which is to bring her as much unhappiness as joy. Her audition number for Florenz Ziegfeld (Walter Pidgeon), “Second-Hand Rose,” is important for the furtherance of Fanny’s career, as it convinces the legendary producer that she has a voice big enough to carry the song, “Beautiful Bride” in the lavish production number that concludes his new show. The number has an important character as well as narrative point. Ziegfeld has pronounced the performance “charming” but has failed to pick up on the comedic impudence and sense of mischief that also characterize Fanny’s vocal performance — precisely the quality that will aggravate his ulcers on opening night, when Fanny’s vocal skills deviate into disobedience. The final song, “My Man,” was one of Fanny Brice’s specialty numbers and, as we shall see, is particularly effective in bringing the film to a dramatic close. Generally speaking, the songs throughout are well chosen to reveal Fanny’s personality and powerful stage presence, and also to move the narrative and the characterization forward. Unusually, for a genre traditionally associated with Utopianism and joyous release, no fewer than seven of the ten numbers end either quietly, abruptly, or sadly. Perhaps because of this, some critics felt Funny Girl lacked the exuberance of the usual screen musical and put the blame on what they saw as Wyler’s heavy-handed direction. However, one suspects that the more somber tone was precisely the reason Wyler had been chosen. Streisand knew she could take care of the musical side of things. What she and Ray Stark needed was someone who could give weight to the dramatic back-story. Before launching into the extended flashback that will cover Fanny’s rise to fame and her early career, Wyler introduces the character in an intriguing way. We see a woman in a leopardskin coat with her back to the camera looking across at the theater advertising the Ziegfeld Follies. The name “Fanny Brice” is displayed in lights. The camera momentarily

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tracks behind this figure as she moves into the theater, almost in the manner of Hitchcock’s opening shots of Marnie (1964), which give the impression of someone panting in pursuit of a mysterious character whose identity he wishes to uncover. Our first glimpse of the heroine’s face comes when she passes a mirror and lowers her coat collar to say to her reflection: “Hello, gorgeous.” It is a moment that sets up the whole film: her cheeky, self-deprecating humor about her appearance, and the fact that her unconventional beauty has gained recognition through the force of her wit, personality, and talent. When her maid finds her to tell her that Mr. Ziegfeld is waiting to see her when she is ready, Fanny recalls that such a situation would at one time have been beyond her wildest dreams. This triggers the flashback. The film’s first song, “If A Girl Isn’t Pretty,” is all about Fanny’s appearance as being detrimental to her chances of stardom. The rest of the film is dedicated to proving that assertion to be wrong. It is a song that also quickly introduces us to Fanny’s Jewish family background and her life on the Lower East Side of New York (which is vibrantly recreated). The sentiment of the song seems at first to have been vindicated, when at an audition for the show “8 Beautiful Girls” (when the doorman looks quizzically at Fanny’s entry, she comments quickly, “The makeup helps a lot”), she is fired by the producer, Mr. Keeney (Frank Faylen). In her heartbreak, she sings “I’m the Greatest Star”— the first of the numbers to end on a melancholy note, and with Fanny close to tears — but she is overheard by one of the stage assistants, Eddie, who will become a close friend. Accordingly, without Keeney’s knowledge, he smuggles her into a roller-skating routine on stage which, to the audience’s delight, she comically disrupts through her skating ineptitude. One is reminded of the hilarious skating routine in Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). The slapstick humor is given an added Chaplinesque touch when Keeney gives Eddie a hefty kick up the rump for disobeying his orders. It is also a reminder of Gene Kelly’s skating routine for his “I Like Myself ” number in the superb Donen-Kelly musical, It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), which brilliantly catches the precariousness of that film’s joie de vivre. In Funny Girl the routine ingeniously vindicates the rhyme of “off-balance” with “talents” that Fanny’s mother, Rose (Kay Medford), has offered in defense of her daughter in the “If A Girl Isn’t Pretty” number. Rose is proved right. The popularity of Fanny’s “off-balance” display gives her the opening for an encore, and her performance of “I’d Rather Be Blue” will lead to a raise in salary, her first meeting with Nicky Arnstein, and a subsequent audition for Ziegfeld. What follows is one of the most important sections of the film. Having auditioned for Ziegfeld, Fanny is overjoyed to be employed as one of the Ziegfeld Girls and excited at being asked (or rather, instructed) to be the main singer in the show’s elaborate finale. However, she bridles (if that is the word) at the song she is called upon to sing, which is “The Most Beautiful Bride in the World.” She then dares to challenge the judgment of her employer, who is regarded by everyone else as “God” (indeed, in part of the exchange he shares with Fanny, we do not actually see Ziegfeld; he is simply a voice coming from on high.) It comes back again to her looks. If she sings that song, she tells Ziegfeld, the audience will laugh and she will be out of a job and back where she started. Ziegfeld has cast her for her vocal power, and is not accustomed (to say the least) to having his decisions questioned. He tells her brusquely to do as she is told. The number goes ahead, but when Fanny appears and turns her profile to the audience before launching into song, the most beautiful bride in the world appears heavily pregnant. We learn afterwards that, in desperation, just before she was due on stage, Fanny has spontaneously pushed a cushion under her dress. It is only by giving the number a comic and ironic inflection that she believes she can make it work.

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The audience is astonished and delighted at the audacity (after all, to suggest that a woman has had intercourse before marriage was a daring thing to do on stage in the early 1900s). Ziegfeld is initially appalled. In terms of Wyler’s cinema, the scene might be compared with Bette Davis’s appearance at the ball in a red dress in Jezebel and Burl Ives’s dramatic interruption of the engagement party in The Big Country. In each case, the disruption is not simply a breach of etiquette but a gesture that challenges the values of that particular social community. Fanny’s act of defiance is a challenge to Ziegfeld’s semi-divine authority, so much so that he is driven to leave his lofty spectator position in the theater and come down to the stalls to get a closer view of what is happening. Wyler typically and eloquently deploys cinematic space to suggest a shifting dynamic in the relationships. Fanny’s performance, which is partly a mockery of the sacredness of the marital state, undercuts the frozen perfection of the Ziegfeld Girls around her, (all dressed in virgin white, of course), and also undercuts the ideal of passive femininity they represent. When she sings, “I am the beautiful reflection/Of my love’s affection,” she does so in a mock-serious vein that sends up the sentiment and makes it impossible to take seriously. When the word “adoration” crops up in the lyric, Fanny looks down naughtily at her pregnant belly, implying that this is what masculine “adoration” has led to. What all this demonstrates is the rich variety of Streisand ‘s vocal ability. In a brilliant analysis of this number, Susan Smith noted how Streisand “mixes moments of self-parody with a more assertive, anarchic style of delivery” and that the range of her vocal ability “manages to convey a fluid sense of identity quite different from the more reductive categorizations of women offered earlier on in the song” (Smith: 57–8). Vocally, Streisand can flip from a straight ballad delivery to mock-opera, throwing in duck noises and an affected “posh” voice, too. In the process, Fanny finds her own voice, which soars above that of Ziegfeld. In this song alone, she reveals herself as funny, feminine, versatile, unapologetic, and individualistic, with a multiplicity of vocal resources that adds up to an original kind of talent and a different kind of beauty. In contrast, the two songs that develop the romance between Fanny and Arnstein fall rather flat. “You are Woman, I am Man” unfolds over a very protracted seduction scene, which begins with Fanny coyly hiding her identity behind a fan and ending when she drops the fan to the floor in romantic surrender. In between we have a dull song that does not tax Omar Sharif ’s limited vocal ability too much, and the heroine’s contribution filmed as an internal monologue, as Fanny assesses her emotional desires. Earlier, the show’s hit song, “People,” is featured in the love scene between the two after Fanny’s outrageous but triumphant stage performance as a Ziegfeld Girl. Unexpectedly, it comes across as the weakest routine in the film. “The visual affront of square photography and a studio alley help to kill the ‘People’ number,” wrote Pauline Kael in The New Yorker (September 28, 1968), adding that she thought that the number was strategically ill-placed as well. It is certainly visually rather inert, with Omar Sharif reduced to little more than a sympathetic onlooker; and the placing of the song does seem to come a little early in the story’s development. The main disappointment, though, is Streisand’s performance, which is strident and out-ofcharacter. It seems like a stage performance from an already self-confident star rather than an intimate song from someone slowly gaining self-confidence. The simplicity of her original recording of the song as a single is what is required here. That version has a purity that is moving in its very directness. The musical number itself is rather stiff. Wyler’s direction loosens up with his handling of the actors, with a lovely close-up of Streisand when Sharif gently lifts her chin (as with

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Bette Davis in Jezebel, Wyler can find an unexpected beauty in the face of someone experiencing true love for the first time). The gesture is to be recalled in their last scene together, just as her little tap dance of farewell to him will be replayed in a darker context later, when Arnstein is led off to prison. Even the presentation of the song is somewhat redeemed by its closing moments, when Fanny is left alone after Arnstein’s farewell, and her reprise of the song’s ending has an appropriate sadness, particularly when she momentarily chokes on the word “luckiest.” At that moment, she feels anything but the luckiest person in the world; and the word foreshadows the role that “luck”— not hers, but the gambler Arnstein’s — is to play in their lives. If “People” is the film’s biggest musical disappointment, “Don’t Rain on My Parade” is its main triumph, bringing the first half to a resounding conclusion. Impulsively, Fanny decides to cut short her Ziegfeld engagements and follow Arnstein to Europe. The song takes the form of an emotional journey, the lyrics distributed along Fanny’s route via train and cab to New York harbor. When her declaration “Nicky Arnstein, here I am!” is answered by the anticlimactic shot of the departing ocean liner, Fanny picks up the momentum of the song by continuing her pursuit on a tugboat. Wyler caps her determination with a helicopter shot that captures her soaring spirit almost in the manner, one might say, of Olivier’s conclusion to his “St. Crispin’s Day” speech in Henry V (1944). (Olivier had originally wanted Wyler to direct that film.) The elevated shot conveys the character’s exhilaration and rising excitement. It is the movie’s most cinematically liberating number. The montage matches the drive of the central character and really moves the narrative forward (in a way that “People” does not). Intriguingly, after the resounding conclusion, Wyler lingers a little longer than expected on the shot of the tugboat, perhaps one of the moments Renata Adler in The New York Times (September 20, 1968) was thinking of when she criticized the film for holding onto shots for too long. In fact, it is more striking how carefully Wyler and his editing team conclude the numbers, sometimes adding a new emotional dimension to the song simply through the way they choose to end it. Here, the momentary silence after the song’s conclusion slightly mists over the note of triumph, and hints that what is to follow for Fanny will not be smooth sailing. The second half of the film tends to be more interesting dramatically than musically, as Fanny’s rise to theatrical stardom is contrasted with the breakdown of her marriage, largely caused by Arnstein’s financial problems and culminating in his imprisonment for embezzlement. Three numbers are particularly significant to the narrative’s momentum. “Sadie, Married Lady” is accompanied by a concise montage of the first year of Fanny’s married life. There is a particularly amusing detail when a shot of her entertaining Florenz Ziegfeld is closely followed by a shot of her in a state of pregnancy, and this time it is for real. An elaborate song and dance routine parodying “Swan Lake” illustrates Fanny’s star status and Streisand’s gift for physical and vocal comedy. It could have distracted from the increasing narrative tension except for one striking piece of strategy on Wyler’s part: he omits the sound of laughter from the theater audience and, by so doing, takes us closer to Fanny’s mood at Arnstein’s having missed her opening night, the anxiety and anger blocking out any evidence of audience delight at her performance. Wyler caps this by quickly and unexpectedly terminating the comic high point of the number — Fanny, on invisible wires, seems to float above the dancers — and cutting to a shot of Fanny at home, sprawled on the couch and awaiting Arnstein’s return. The abruptness of the cut is another eloquent indicator of mood, implying Fanny’s eagerness for the show to end and also suggesting how any laughter or triumph emanating from the performance is canceled out in her mind by the strains

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now appearing in her marriage. When Arnstein returns home late, Wyler lingers for a notably long time on a shot of the back of Fanny’s head, delaying a revelation of her response, a tactic that adds greatly to the scene’s tension. In his Village Voice review (October 10, 1968), Andrew Sarris shrewdly saw a correlation between Wyler’s direction of this scene and his work on The Letter. “Admirers of William Wyler’s staging of dramatic scenes,” he wrote, “might compare the visual lines of tension the director establishes in the sofa-and-I’ll-see-you-to-the-door-scene with the equivalent effect in The Letter back in 1940. Wyler has lost none of his impersonal expertness over the years.” I would quibble over the word “impersonal,” as I would over Sarris’s later description of Wyler’s professionalism as “chilling,” but I agree that Wyler’s camera placement adds enormously to the scene’s effect, with the atmosphere of discord emphasized by the oddly asymmetrical framing and what Sarris calls the “lines of tension.” Sharif is at his finest here, the initial ease and charm giving way to awkward and defensive blustering under the pressure of Fanny’s silence and the camera’s unblinking, accusing stare. Everything is building to the film’s finale (apparently Wyler’s own inspiration), Fanny’s stage performance of her signature number, “My Man.” She sings after a reunion with Arnstein in her dressing room but where he has said goodbye for the last time, with an affectionate hand on her shoulder seeming a fleeting homage to the heartbreaking farewell scene in David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), and where Fanny — seemingly for the umpteenth time — is left staring at her reflection in the mirror, her misery writ large. The cut from her farewell scene with Arnstein to her appearance as a tiny figure on a dark, lonely stage gives a momentary sense of vulnerability but, as the performance takes flight, Fanny begins to command the space and make it her own. One recalls something she has told Arnstein much earlier in their relationship: “That’s where I live ... on stage.” Streisand’s performance of the song has a dramatic, throbbing intensity worthy of Judy Garland. Wyler again cuts abruptly at the end of the song before the audience applause can begin, leaving us in a state of suspension with the woman, the performer, the sadness, and the darkness. Stylistically old-fashioned, perhaps (Wyler’s one concession to modishness is a comic freeze-frame close-up of Fanny when she meets Arnstein for the first time and her heart momentarily stops beating), Funny Girl nevertheless is a musical that ends in an unusually melancholy mode, anticipating some of the most imaginative musicals of the 1970s, such as Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972) and Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977), which end more gloomily than euphorically, and invite an audience to think about and question genre conventions.

The Liberation of L. B. Jones (1970) “By then the bargain with Oman had been struck.... The slow question, forming in his mind of late, was how wisely he had chosen. Corrupt brutal police force; grim versions of the third degree; two standards of justice predicated upon a sensible leniency for the white man and harsh sentencing of the black” — Jesse Hill Ford, The Liberation of L. B. Jones, Chapter 3 “I think it was a good picture, but nobody came to see it. Black people came to see it, but it wasn’t made for them. It was made for the white people, and they stayed away. It embarrassed them” — William Wyler

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The later films of veteran directors tend to be mellow, reflective, or elegiac affairs: think of Huston, Chaplin, Wilder, a curmudgeon like Lindsay Anderson or even European pessimists like Bunuel, Bergman, or Tarkovsky. By contrast, Wyler’s swan song (although not planned as that at the time) is an indictment of racial prejudice so ferocious that Columbia was at first hesitant to release the film for fear it might cause riots. The words “unexpected,” “surprising,” and even “sickening” seemed to spring quite often to the lips of critics at that time, rather taken aback by the horrific imagery and narrative from a director more often noted (not always favorably) for his liberal sentiments and visual restraint. Although Variety (March 11, 1970) dismissed the film as “unfortunately not much more than an interracial sexploitation film,” Andrew Sarris — not one of Wyler’s most consistent admirers — thought it remarkable as a potential recruitment aid for the Black Panthers. He called it “the first American movie to countenance and even condone bloody revenge by the black against his white oppressor” (Village Voice, April 23, 1970). It was Sarris, ironically, who had helped cause the decline of Wyler’s critical reputation during the heyday of auteurism. He had called Wyler’s films cold and impersonal, but this film is quite the reverse of that: hot and impassioned. Set in a small town in Tennessee in the early 1960s (the action of the novel concludes with the townspeople hearing of the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas), The Liberation of L. B. Jones is based on a novel by Jesse Hill Ford and was adapted for the screen by the author in collaboration with screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, who the previous year had won an Oscar for his screenplay for Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967). Undoubtedly, part of the impact of Wyler’s film comes from its difference from recent commercial successes about the race issue, such as In the Heat of the Night and Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1968), which had attacked prejudice but had been ultimately optimistic about the possibilities of racial harmony. L. B. Jones is much less comforting, much more hard-hitting. Wyler had touched on the race issue before in films like Jezebel and The Little Foxes, but only tangentially. L. B. Jones confronts the theme head-on. A wealthy black undertaker, Lord Byron Jones (played with great dignity by Roscoe Lee Browne), decides to sue his young wife, Emma (Lola Falana), for divorce on the grounds of her adulterous relationship with a white policeman, Willie Joe Worth (Anthony Zerbe). Jones requests the services of the most distinguished and respected lawyer in town, Oman Hedgepath (Lee J. Cobb), who agrees to represent Jones mainly in order to impress his nephew and now junior partner Steve Mundine (Lee Majors). However, when Emma, who is pregnant and determined to get a hefty alimony settlement to benefit her child, decides to contest the divorce, Hedgepath begins to get cold feet, because it will mean that the name of her lover will be made public in court, with calamitous consequences for racial harmony and for the policeman’s career. (Such a relationship, first of all, is against the law; Willie Joe is also a married man.) Can L. B. Jones or Emma be persuaded to drop the case; and, if not by reason, then by force? What follows is an ugly series of events that uncovers a procession of sexual and legal hypocrisies by which the black community is oppressed in that community, and to which some form of resistance or violence seems the inevitable response. To reinforce this, a sinister subplot simmering in the background involves a young black man, Sonny Boy Mosby (Yaphet Kotto), who has returned to the community to wreak vengeance on the white policeman, Stanley Bumpas (Arch Johnson), who had nearly beaten him to death years before. Here there is an echo of a similar situation in The Desperate Hours when Humphrey Bogart’s escaped convict returns to the town to settle with the

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arresting officer who had broken his jaw. It is a recurrent refrain in Wyler’s films: the futility of violence that only begets more violence. The story is based on fact, but the material conforms in outline to classic Southern melodrama about racial injustice and prejudice leading to violence; and it is arguable whether Wyler quite finds a style able to accommodate all these diverse elements. There is a certain unevenness of tone, characterization, and performance, and not all of the film is equally convincing. For example, L. B. Jones’s marriage is never given much credence, so the divorce seems more a vehicle to launch the narrative than a strongly motivated emotional situation. In fairness, that is equally true in the novel, and Jones’s feelings of humiliation in his scenes with Emma are well conveyed by Roscoe Lee Browne. One might feel that this could even prompt his fatal defiance at the end. The character of Emma is unsympathetically drawn, taunting both men in her life with a sexuality that provocatively invites violence, though one can appreciate why she is looking out for herself and her own survival in a society where the abuse of black women by white males seems an accepted part of the culture. To emphasize that, there is a particularly unpleasant scene when Willie Joe, after an argument with Emma, takes out his frustration in the back of his police car on a young black woman who has asked for help, the rape being watched with relish in his rear-view mirror by Willie Joe’s partner, Bumpas. In the novel, this incident takes place earlier and is rendered as part of the vicious, casual sexual exploitation regularly visited on black females by the police and to which everyone in the community turns a blind eye. In the film, although still rendered in all its repulsiveness, the incident is more closely related to Willie Joe’s displaced anger and frustration after his argument with Emma; he even mistakenly addresses the young woman as “Emma.” Willie Joe is a wretched character but Anthony Zerbe’s skilful performance, while in no way softening the character’s nastiness, suggests someone who is not entirely devoid of moral sense, and who has a confused conscience writhing beneath the conditioned bigotry. In contrast to Zerbe’s performance as Willie Joe, Lee Majors and Barbara Hershey, as the young married couple, Steve and Nella, are unable to make much headway with their characterizations. In some ways, their inability to influence matters is part of the point but it makes for pallid drama. Nella is a much more positive and outspoken character in the novel than in the film, though Hershey, suggesting the fine actress she was to become, has one very good scene with Lee J. Cobb, where her warmth and sympathy cause the aging lawyer to realize what he has missed out on in his life, and how his humanity has been slowly eroded into compromise and conformity by the community in which he has lived and thrived. His confession of a youthful love affair with a black woman gives him some sympathy with Willie Joe’s dilemma but, more significantly, has forced a recognition of another black person as a human being who can touch his heart. How much has he learned from this experience? Lee J. Cobb’s performance has a gruff, deceptively avuncular quality that only thinly conceals the character’s disreputable pragmatism. Cobb, as always, makes a good heavy, but it is interesting to speculate how the film might have turned out if Henry Fonda (Wyler’s first choice) had been available for the role. In interviews, Fonda would talk of seeing a black man lynched by a mob as the most horrific of his childhood memories, and his screen persona time and again reflected the epitome of liberal decency. To place that persona in this steamy context and watch it wilt under the pressure of events would have been explosive indeed. Expertly shot by the second unit under Robert Swink’s supervision, the pre-credit scene shows a train journey to the small Tennessee town of Somerton. A young white couple

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obviously in love, Steve and Nella, are looking out of the window, and the film cuts to what they see: beautiful farmland, a black boy delivering newspapers on his bicycle in an attractive suburb. They are traveling to meet Steve’s uncle, Oman, who has offered his nephew a partnership in his law firm. Also on the train is Sonny Boy Mosby, and when the film cuts to what he sees, the view is very different: a run-down area occupied solely by black people. He, too, is traveling to Somerton with a purpose, but a vengeful one: to track down Bumpas and kill him. The cigar box he carefully carries contains a loaded gun. At the end (also filmed by Swink’s second unit), the film will reverse this opening, with a now somberly dressed and disillusioned Steve and Nella departing from Somerton, and Sonny Boy, having completed his murderous mission, leaving also. The film closes with the sound of Bumpas’s hay baler (into which he has been thrown and sliced to pieces by Sonny Boy). The racket pounds in the young man’s head, obliterating the hymns being sung at Jones’s funeral. It brings the film full circle and to a powerfully pessimistic conclusion. Two scenes are particularly fine. A scene around the breakfast table, where Willie Joe tries to pressure Jones into dropping his divorce case, is a reminder of Wyler’s mastery of mise-en-scène. L. B. Jones stands to one side, his stillness suggestive of his obstinacy and of a mind made up, while Willie Joe nervously paces around the table, his inability to settle in one spot and command the frame illustrative of his failure to intimidate Jones, and of his own innate weakness of character. One only needs to look at the way Wyler orchestrates the placing and movement of the two men to know which one is the stronger of the two, irrespective of who is speaking. By the end, Willie Joe looks more pressured than Jones, and his irritation at his partner Bumpas’s tooting his horn outside to hurry up his colleague means that he quite fails to notice a significant detail: that the breakfast table is set for three and that, contrary to what Jones has told him, Jones is not alone. (Sonny Boy and Jones’s friend, Benny, are hiding in adjoining rooms, listening to what is being said.) As additional evidence of his distracted dimness, Willie Joe even picks up Sonny Boy’s cigar box from the table without suspecting a possible connection between that and a cigar box he also picked up and then discarded when he questioned Sonny Boy after he had seen him jumping off the train. There is a kind of grim humor to this. The brutality of the police is in inverse proportion to their brains. Indeed, the only overtly humorous moment in the entire film will be directed at the police, when the police chief (played by Wyler’s resident heavy, Ray Teal), realizing that the man charged with Jones’s murder was actually in a cell at the time, attacks the desk sergeant (Chill Wills) with the electric cattle-prod used to extract the entirely bogus confession. “I’ve seen better heads on cabbages!” he exclaims. The other outstanding sequence is the ten-minute chase across a junkyard after Jones has escaped from the police car and is pursued by Willie Joe and Bumpas, who are now intent on silencing him before he can get to court. Elmer Bernstein’s score, used very sparingly, has just enough soft spookiness to ratchet up the tension. The setting is the stuff of nightmare, a wasteland that provides an apt background for the ugly emotions unleashed, and that provides only precarious protection against evil. A dog belonging to a blind man who lives on the site is cold-bloodedly shot by Bumpas when it approaches. He shows no more mercy to Jones, either. When the latter comes out from his hiding place, he goads Willie Joe into murder and then castrates the corpse and removes the dead man’s shoelaces, to give the impression of what he calls a “nigger revenge” killing. (Willie Joe has just enough humanity to be sick while all this is going on.) There can be few more desolate and disturbing images in Hollywood cinema than this sequence’s final overhead shot of Jones’s murdered body hanging by a hook next to that of a dead dog, which is being called

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in the distance by its blind owner, while the two policemen silently survey the result of their night’s work. The events are horrific enough, but what gives them added force is the originality of the film’s narrative structure. Wyler and his screenwriters construct a genre model of the liberal Hollywood movie, which they ruthlessly dismantle. Around the middle of the film there are scenes which are seemingly set up in readiness for some sort of humane or harmonious resolution; and then, one by one, Wyler subverts our expectations. Steve confronts his uncle and asks him to live up to the image he had of him and be the hero he thought he was. Having cued this transformation, Wyler then pulls the rug from under our feet. Far from revealing the humanity under the gruff exterior, Hedgepath becomes even more deeply compromised and condemned by his selective morality, for he winds up falsifying evidence to protect Willie Joe (who has confessed to the crime). One might expect the clean-cut liberal nephew to become an active force for change, but he walks out of the situation with a gesture of righteous but impotent anger. (Young people walking out on parent figures whose values they reject is not an uncommon element of Wyler endings — one thinks of The Little Foxes and The Heiress, for example — but there is usually a feeling that they are embracing a positive alternate rather than retreating in negative despair.) Also at this stage in the film, there is a scene where Jones recalls an occasion when a black man on a picket line outside a Whites-only store has been forced to run when threatened by the armed owner. Jones wonders what would have happened if the black man had stood his ground. Hiding later in that junkyard from the police, Jones has the opportunity to run but courageously decides to stand his ground. The result is not vindication but murder and mutilation. Finally, there is the moment (not in the novel) when Sonny Boy has Bumpas in the sights of his gun when the latter is doing some farming, but finds he cannot pull the trigger, as if he has found the need for violence has gone. Ironically, if he had pulled the trigger then, Jones’s life might have been saved, because it is unlikely that Willie Joe would have had the stomach to murder Jones by himself. In the event, this renunciation of violence will be short-lived, and the feeling will return at the end, as one might say, with a vengeance. It results in a death much more sadistic and gruesome than the one originally envisaged. For some critics, this was all too much. Reviews were decidedly mixed. At one extreme was the Saturday Review (March 28, 1970) which castigated the film as “a sadistic melodrama that fairly pullulates with sickening violence” and thought it a shame “that a director of Wyler’s stature has seen fit to perpetuate these outdated images of the South.” As Jan Herman wryly noted of this review, “Apparently the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. two years earlier in Memphis, Tennessee, had escaped the critic’s notice” (Herman: 453). On September 23 of that year, Jesse Hill Ford sent Wyler a recent newspaper clipping reporting a case where white policemen were accused of torturing black suspects with an electric cattle prod — so much for the events being “outdated.” A more measured critical response came from Charles Champlin in the Los Angeles Times (March 15, 1970), who said “the picture told of the ongoing immutable and settled presumption of white superiority and black inferiority.... The argument of the movie is that we can only be served by the truth, unpalatable as it may be.” In his last interview a few days before his death, Wyler told his daughter Catherine that he had aimed the film at a white audience, whom he hoped would be embarrassed and enraged by what he had depicted. Perhaps he succeeded too well. In the immortal phrase of Sam Goldwyn, the public stayed away in droves. Wyler’s picture of a conflicted America might have struck too many raw nerves in a country still reeling over the departure of

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another LBJ, the assassination of Robert Kennedy as well as Martin Luther King, and a divisive war in Vietnam. The film seemed to fall off the critical map, almost forgotten and displaced by black American filmmakers with their own visions of the black experience. The director nevertheless insisted it was a good movie and declared himself prejudiced in its favor. The Liberation of L. B. Jones demonstrated that, to the very end of his career, Wyler was still unafraid to venture into new cinematic territory and vigorously denounce injustice. The movie is not a comfortable experience (it makes To Kill a Mockingbird look like Mary Poppins), but it deserves reclamation as one of the bravest indictments of racial hatred ever to come out of a major Hollywood studio.

Conclusion A few select quotations:

ANDRÉ BAZIN “Wyler cannot have imitators, only disciples” (1948) Unlike some great directors (like Hitchcock, Welles, Bergman, and Antonioni), who have a distinctive style that can be imitated or even parodied, Wyler was a director whose style was impossible to imitate, because it was unobtrusive, flexible, and varied, and dictated by the subject matter rather than by ego. Whereas some directors saw their role as bending the material to their own will, Wyler saw his as submitting his will to the requirements of the material. To use a musical analogy that Wyler sometimes employed, he saw himself as a conductor rather than a composer — the kind of conductor whose job it was to efface rather than impose his personality, so that the material can be presented in the best possible light without overt intervention or intrusive interpretation (which, of course, does not preclude the finest decisions of judgment and selection). In terms of imitations, there have been a number of remakes of Wyler’s films, including new versions of Wuthering Heights, The Memphis Belle, The Heiress (under its original title, Washington Square), and The Desperate Hours. None has displaced the original in cinematic esteem, not even Luis Bunuel’s 1953 attempt at Emily Bronte. Michael Caton-Jones’s feature, Memphis Belle (1990), is of particular interest, because it was co-produced by Catherine Wyler. The flying sequences reproduce the danger and claustrophobia of the missions to frightening effect, but the personal stories never quite match the documentary immediacy and poignancy of the original. The best remake of a Wyler movie remains his own second shot at Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, his corrective to the sexual evasions of These Three, which demonstrated that the best reason for remaking a film in the first place is not to duplicate the original’s success but to amend what was wrong. As for disciples:

AKIRA KUROSAWA “I was very intrigued by the work of important foreign directors like King Vidor, Rouben Mamoulian, and William Wyler. Their films became an important basis of support for my life afterwards”—Sight and Sound interview, Summer 1981 One of the oversights of auteurist criticism is that it did not take sufficient account of a director’s standing in the eyes of his peers, which in turn made their own criticism less 227

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persuasive. Sergio Leone told the story that, when he was an assistant director on Ben-Hur, he saw Charlton Heston turn up one day dressed as a cowboy in the middle of a Roman arena, so that Wyler could reshoot one shot of The Big Country that was still troubling him (which was then edited into all the completed prints). “It’s incredible, but true,” he said. “That shows the extent of his power at the time” (Frayling: 75). Wyler was an inspiration to numerous filmmakers. A revered modern critic like David Thomson might have his doubts about Wyler’s stature, but they were not shared by fellow directors such as Kurosawa, Ozu, Melville, Wilder, Lean, and Eisenstein.

JOHN RUSSELL TAYLOR “If, in the final analysis, Wyler is not accounted a great director, there is no question but that he has made a fair handful of great films”—The Movie The dubious logic of that comment has been discussed in the Introduction, but if what was meant was that Wyler had made a “fair handful of great films” without in the last analysis being accounted an auteur, the remark becomes more intriguing. Although the auteur theory was essentially deployed to establish a hierarchy of great directors, it is worth asserting that one could be a great director without necessarily being an auteur, just as one could certainly be an auteur without necessarily being a great director. In insisting on the importance of individual expression and creativity, auteurist critics were always in danger of underestimating the collaborative nature of filmmaking and the fact that an important aspect of a great director’s art is the capacity to get the best out of every member of his team. Wyler had that capacity in spades. By prioritizing thematic and stylistic consistency, auteuristic critics were always prone to overlook the virtues of versatility in a director like Wyler, which might indicate a broader and more inclusive talent that not only stretches itself across all genres but encompasses life in all its variety. GREGORY PECK “The real Wyler is on permanent display in his films. They show a man tender and tough, equally gifted in comedy and drama, with a sensitivity for character and an awareness of the workings of the human heart that has never been surpassed”— Eulogy at the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award, 1976 Ceremonies such as this encourage effusiveness of that order, which might conceal the fact that what Peck was saying was fundamentally true. It also, valuably, suggested that one should judge a director across his entire oeuvre, looking not necessarily for a thematic key or a stylistic signature, but an output that reflects the many-sidedness of a human personality. (As Walt Whitman wrote in Song of Myself, when recognizing his occasional contradictions: “I am large; I contain multitudes.”) In fact, in viewing and re-viewing Wyler’s body of work over time, one does begin to get a strong sense of the personality behind it: his humor, his humanity, his honesty, his courage, his understanding of human nature, the wide range of his social sympathies, and his absolute abhorrence of intolerance and racial prejudice.

YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO “Thank you for your existence”— His message to Wyler, conveyed by Wyler’s daughter, Melanie when returning from a visit to Russia The great Soviet poet Yevtushenko is probably best known in the West for the poem “Babi Yar,” his devastating indictment of anti–Semitism that was unforgettably set to music

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by Shostakovich in his Symphony No. 13. Yevtushenko’s message to Wyler made a lovely conclusion to Axel Madsen’s biography, and was a token of the internationalism of Wyler’s appeal. The gratitude Yevtushenko expressed is something I endorse, and have no doubt is echoed by legions of film lovers the world over, whose lives have forever been touched and enriched by his work. I will conclude with another Yevtushenko quotation: “Great art succeeds where medicine fails — victory over death” (Wilson: 367). Or as Roger Leenhardt put it so defiantly all those years ago: “Vive Wyler!”

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Filmography and Awards Hard Fists (Universal, 1927) Presented by: Carl Laemmle; Adaptationcontinuity: William Lester, George H. Plympton, from a story “The Grappler” by Charles A. Logue; Cinematographer: Edwin Linden; Art director: David S. Garber; Cast: Art Acord (Art Alvord), Louise Lorraine (Betty Barnes), Lee Holmes (Jed Leach), Albert J. Smith (Charles Crane)

Two-reel westerns (1925–1927) Crook Buster, The Gunless Bad Man, Ridin’ for Love, The Fire Barrier, Don’t Shoot, The Pinnacle Rider, Martin of the Mounted, Two Fister, Kelcy Gets his Man, Tenderfoot Courage, The Silent Partner, Blazing Days, Galloping Justice, The Haunted Homestead, The Lone Star, The Ore Raiders (incorrectly listed as The Ore Riders in several sources), The Home Trail, Gun Justice, The Phantom Outlaw, The Square Shooter, The Horse Trader, Daze of the West. (Wyler was also assistant director on The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), and production assistant on Ben-Hur (1925).

The Border Cavalier (Universal, 1927) Presented by: Carl Laemmle; Story-scenario: Basil Dickey; Titles: Gardner Bradford; Cinematographer: Al Jones; Art director: David S. Garber; Cast: Fred Humes (Larry Day), Evelyn Pierce (Anne Martin), C. E. “Captain” Anderson (Beaver Martin), Boris Bullock (Victor Harding), Joyce Compton (Madge Lawton), Dick La Reno (Dave Lawton), Dick L’Estrange (Lazy), Gilbert “Pee Wee” Holmes (Pee Wee), Benny Corbett (Bennie)

Five-reel westerns Lazy Lightning (Universal, 1926) Presented by: Carl Laemmle; Story-scenario: Harrison Jacobs; Cinematographer: Eddie Linden Cast: Art Acord (Rance Lighton), Fay Wray (Lila Rogers), Bobby Gordon (Dickie Rogers), Vin Moore (Sheriff Dan Boyd), Arthur Morrison (Henry S. Rogers), George K. French (Doctor Hull), Rex De Roselli (William Harvey)

Straight Shootin’ (Universal, 1927) Presented by: Carl Laemmle; Story-scenario: William Lester; Titles: Gardner Bradford; Cinematographer: Milton Bridenbecker; Art director: David S. Garber; Cast: Ted Wells ( Jack Roberts), Garry O’Dell (Malpai Joe), Lillian Gilmore (Bess Hale), Joe Bennett (Tom Hale), Wilbur Mack (Black Brody), George Connors ( John Hale), Al Ferguson (Stephen Clemens)

The Stolen Ranch (Universal, 1926) Presented by: Carl Laemmle; Story-scenario: Robert F. Hill and George H. Plympton; Cinematographer: Al Jones; Cast: Fred Humes (“Breezy” Hart), Louise Lorraine (Mary Jane), William Norton Bailey (Sam Hardy), Ralph McCullough (Frank Wilcox), Nita Cavalier ( June Marston), Edward Cecil (Silas Marston), Howard Truesdell (Tom Marston), Slim Whittaker (Hank), Jack Kirk (Slim); Blazing Days (Universal, 1927); Presented by: Carl Laemmle; Storyscenario: Florence Ryerson, George H. Plympton, Robert F. Hill; Cinematographer: Al Jones; Art director: David S. Garber; Cast: Fred Humes (Smilin’ Sam Perry), Edna Gregory (Milly Morgan), Churchill Ross ( Jim Morgan), Bruce Gordon (“Dude” Dutton), Eva Thatcher (Ma Bascomb), Bernard Siegel (Ezra Skinner), Dick L’Estrange (“Turtle-Neck-Pete”)

Desert Dust (Universal, 1927) Presented by: Carl Laemmle; Story-scenario: William Lester; Titles: Gardner Bradford; Cinematographer: Milton Bridenbecker; Art director: David S. Garber; Cast: Ted Wells (Frank Fortune), Lotus Thompson (Helen Marsden), Bruce Gordon (“Butch” Rorke), Jimmy Phillips (The Rat), Charles “Slim” Cole (The Parson), George Ovey (Shorty Benton), Dick L’Estrange (Slim Donovan) Thunder Riders (Universal, 1928) Presented by: Carl Laemmle; Story-scenario: Basil Dickey and Carl Krusada; Titles: Gardner Bradford; Cinematographer: Milton Bridenbecker; Art director: David S. Garber; Editor: Harry Marker; Cast: Ted Wells ( Jack Duncan), Charlotte Stevens (Betty Bar-

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ton), William A. Steele (Lem Dawson), Bill Dyer (Lon Seeright), Leo White (Prof. Wilfred Winkle), Julia Griffith (Cynthia Straight), Bob Burns (Sheriff ), Pee Wee Holmes, Dick L’Estrange (riders)

Features Anybody Here Seen Kelly? (Universal, 1928) Producer: Robert Wyler; Story: Leigh Jason; Scenario: John B. Clymer; Adaptation: Joseph Franklin Poland, James Gruen, Rob Wagner, Earl Snell, Samuel M. Pike; Titles: Walter Anthony and Albert De Mond; Cinematographer: Charles Stumar; Editor: George McGuire; Cast: Tom Moore (Pat Kelly), Bessie Love (Mitzi Lavelle), Tom O’Brien (Buck Johnson), Kate Price (Mrs. O’Grady), Alfred Allen (Sergeant Malloy), Wilson Benge (butler), Rosa Gore (French mother); Running time: 83 minutes The Shakedown (Universal, 1929) Screenplay: Charles A. Logue and Clarence J. Marks; Titles and Dialogue: Albert De Mond; Cinematographers: Charles Stumar and Jerome Ash; Music: Joseph Cherniavsky; Editors: Lloyd Nosler and Richard Cahoon; Cast: James Murray (Dave Roberts), Barbara Kent (Marjorie), George Kotsonaros (Battling Roff ), Wheeler Oakman (manager), Jack Hanlon (Clem), Harry Gibbon (bouncer); Running time: 88 minutes The Love Trap (Universal, 1929) Scenario: John B. Clymer and Clarence J. Marks.; Dialogue: Clarence Thompson; Titles: Albert De Mond; Story: Edward J. Montagne; Cinematographer: Gilbert Warrenton; Editor: Maurice Pivar; Cast: Laura La Plante (Evelyn Todd), Neil Hamilton (Peter Cadwallader), Robert Ellis (Guy Emory), Jocelyn Lee (Bunny), Norman Trevor ( Judge Cadwallader), Clarissa Selwynne (Mrs. Cadwallader), Rita Le Roy (Mary Cadwallader); Running time: 83 minutes Hell’s Heroes (Universal, 1930) Presented by: Carl Laemmle; Adaptation-scenariodialogue: Tom Reed, from Peter B. Kyne’s novel The Three Godfathers (1913); Cinematographer: George Robinson; Film editor: Harry Marker; Cast: Charles Bickford (Bob Sangster), Raymond Hatton (“Barbwire” Gibbons), Fred Kohler (“Wild Bill” Kearney), Fritzi Ridgeway (mother), Maria Alba (Carmelita), José De La Cruz ( José), Buck Connors (Parson Jones), Walter James (sheriff ); Running time: 82 minutes The Storm (Universal, 1930) Presented by: Carl Laemmle; Screenplay: Wells Root, from the play The Storm (1919) by Langdon McCormick; Adaptation: Charles A. Logue; Dialogue: Tom Reed; Cinematographer: Alvin Wyckoff; Sound: Joseph P. Lapis and C. Roy Hunter; Cast: Lupe Velez (Manette Fachard), William Boyd (Burr Winton), Paul

Cavanagh (Dave Stewart), Alphonse Ethier ( Jaques Fachard), Ernest Adams (Johnny); Running time: 76 minutes A House Divided (Universal, 1931) Presented by: Carl Laemmle; Producer: Carl Laemmle Jr.; Assistant producer: Paul Kohner; Screenplay: John B. Clymer and Dale Van Every, from the story “Heart and Hand” by Olive Edens; Dialogue: John Huston; Cinematographer: Charles Stumar; Editor: Ted Kent; Cast: Walter Huston (Seth Law), Kent Douglass (Matt Law), Helen Chandler (Ruth Evans), Vivian Oakland (Bess), Frank Hagney (Mann), Mary Foy (Mary), Walter Brennan (musician); Running time: 70 minutes Tom Brown of Culver (Universal, 1932) Screenplay: Tom Buckingham and George Green; Story: George Green and Dale Van Every; Cinematographer: Charles Stumar; Editor: Ted Kent; Cast: Tom Brown (Tom Brown), H. B. Warner (Doc Brown), Slim Summerville (Slim), Richard Cromwell (Bob Randolph), Ben Alexander (Ralph), Sidney Toler (Major Wharton), Russell Hopton (Doctor), Andy Devine (call boy), Willard Robertson (Captain While), Norman Philips Jr. (Carruthers), Tyrone Power Jr. ( John); Running time: 70 minutes Her First Mate (Universal, 1933) Produced by: Carl Laemmle, Jr.; Screenplay by: Earl Snell and Clarence Marks, from the play Salt Water by Daniel Jarrett, Frank Craven, and John Golden; Cinematographer: George Robinson; Editor: Ted Kent; Cast: Slim Summerville ( John Horner), ZaSu Pitts (Mary Horner), Una Merkel (Hattie), Warren Hymer (Percy), Berton Churchill (Davis), George Marion (Sam), Henry Armetta (Socrates); Running time: 66 minutes Counsellor at Law (Universal, 1933) Producer: Henry Henigson; Screenplay: Elmer Rice, from his play Counsellor at Law (1931); Cinematographer: Norbert Brodine; Art director: Charles D. Hall; Editor: Daniel Mandell; Cast: John Barrymore (George Simon), Bebe Daniels (Regina Gordon), Doris Kenyon (Cora Simon), Onslow Stevens ( John P. Tedesco), Isabel Jewell (Bessie Green), Melvyn Douglas (Roy Darwin), Thelma Todd (Lillian La Rue), Richard Quine (Richard), Marvin Kline (Hebert Weinberg), John Qualen (Breitstein), Bobby Gordon (Henry Susskind), Vincent Sherman (Harry Becker); Running time: 78 minutes Glamour (Universal, 1934) Presented by: Carl Laemmle; Screenplay: Doris Anderson and Gladys Unger, from a short story by Edna Ferber; Cinematographer: George Robinson; Editor: Ted Kent; Cast: Constance Cummings (Linda Fayne), Paul Lukas (Victor Banki), Philip Reed (Lorenzo Valenti), Joseph Cawthorne (Ibsen), Doris Lloyd (Nana), Lyman Williams (Forsyth), David Dickinson (Stevie), Peggy Campbell (Amy), Olaf

Filmography and Awards Hytten (Dobbs), Luis Alberni (Monsieur Paul), Louise Beavers (Millie); Running time: 74 minutes The Good Fairy (Universal, 1935) Producer: Carl Laemmle, Jr.; Screenplay: Preston Sturges, from the play The Good Fairy (1932) by Ferenc Molnar; Cinematographer: Norbert Brodine; Art director: Charles D. Hall; Music: Heinz Roemheld; Editor: Daniel Mandell; Cast: Margaret Sullavan (Luisa Ginglebusher), Herbert Marshall (Dr. Sporum), Frank Morgan (Konrad), Reginald Owen (Detlaff ), Alan Hale (Schlapkohl), Eric Blore (Doctor Metz), Beulah Bondi (Doctor Schultz), Cesar Romero ( Joe), Luis Alberni (Barber), Frank Moran, Torben Meyer, Al Bridge; Running time: 98 minutes The Gay Deception (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1935) Producer: Jesse L. Lasky; Screenplay: Stephen Avery and Don Hartman; Additional dialogue: Arthur Richman (and Sam Raphaelson, uncredited); Cinematographer: Joseph Valentine; Art director: Max Parker; Costumes: William Lambert; Music: Louis de Francesco; Cast: Francis Lederer (Sandro), Frances Dee (Mirabel), Benita Hume (Miss Channing), Alan Mowbray (Lord Clewe), Akim Tamiroff (Spellek), Lennox Pawle (Consul General), Adele St. Maur (Lucille), Ferdinand Gottschalk (Mr. Squires), Lenita Lane (Peg DeForrest), Paul Hurst (bell captain), Luis Alberni (Ernest), Lionel Stander (Gettel); Running time: 79 minutes; Oscar nomination: Best Screenplay These Three (Samuel Goldwyn/United Artists, 1936) Producer: Samuel Goldwyn; Screenplay: Lillian Hellman, from her play The Children’s Hour (1934); Cinematographer: Gregg Toland; Art director: Richard Day; Costumes: Omar Kiam; Music: Alfred Newman; Editor: Daniel Mandell; Cast: Miriam Hopkins (Martha Dobie), Merle Oberon (Karen Wright), Joel McCrea ( Joseph Cardin), Catherine Doucet (Mrs. Mortar), Alma Kruger (Mrs. Tilford), Bonita Granville (Mary Tilford), Marcia Mae Jones (Rosalie), Carmencita Johnson (Evelyn), Margaret Hamilton (Agatha), Marie Louise Cooper (Helen Burton), Walter Brennan (taxi driver); Running time: 93 minutes; Oscar nomination: Best Supporting Actress (Bonita Granville) Dodsworth (Samuel Goldwyn/United Artists, 1936) Producer: Samuel Goldwyn; Screenplay: Sidney Howard, from his play and from the novel Dodsworth (1929) by Sinclair Lewis; Cinematographer: Rudolph Maté; Art director: Richard Day; Costumes: Omar Kiam; Music: Alfred Newman; Editor: Daniel Mandell; Cast: Walter Huston (Sam Dodsworth), Ruth Chatterton (Fran Dodsworth), Paul Lukas (Arnold Iselin), Mary Astor (Edith Cortright), David Niven (Captain Lockert), Gregory Gaye (Kurt von Obers-

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dorf ), Maria Ouspenskaya (Baroness von Obersdorf ), Odette Myrtil (Renée de Penable), Spring Byington (Matey Pearson), Harlan Briggs (Tubby Pearson), Kathryn Marlowe (Emily McKee), John Howard Payne (Harry McKee); Running time: 102 minutes; Oscar: Art Direction; Oscar nominations: Best Picture; Best Actor (Walter Huston); Best Supporting Actress (Maria Ouspenskaya); Best Director; Best Screenplay; Best Sound recording (Oscar Lagerstrom); New York Critics Award: Best Actor (Walter Huston) Come and Get It (Samuel Goldwyn/United Artists, 1936) Producer: Samuel Goldwyn; Directors: Howard Hawks and William Wyler; Logging scenes directed by: Richard Rosson; Screenplay: Jules Furthman and Jane Murfin, based on the novel by Edna Ferber; Photography: Gregg Toland and Rudolph Mate; Editor: Edward Curtiss; Art director: Richard Day; Music: Alfred Newman; Cast: Edward Arnold (Barney Glasgow), Joel McCrea (Richard Glasgow), Frances Farmer (Lotta Morgan/Lotta Bostrom), Walter Brennan (Swan Bostrom), Andrea Leeds (Evvie Glasgow), Frank Shields (Tony Schwerke), Mady Christians (Karie), Mary Nash (Emma Louise Glasgow), Clem Bevans (Gunnar Gallagher), Cecil Cunningham ( Josie); Running Time: 105 minutes; Oscar: Best Supporting Actor (Walter Brennan); Oscar nomination: Best Editing Dead End (Samuel Goldwyn/United Artists, 1937) Producer: Samuel Goldwyn; Screenplay: Lillian Hellman, from the play Dead End (1936) by Sidney Kingsley; Cinematographer: Gregg Toland; Art director: Richard Day; Music: Alfred Newman; Editor: Daniel Mandell; Cast: Sylvia Sidney (Drina), Joel McCrea (Dave), Humphrey Bogart (Baby Face Martin), Wendy Barrie (Kay), Claire Trevor (Francey), Allen Jenkins (Hunk), Marjorie Main (Mrs. Martin), Billy Halop (Tommy), Huntz Hall (Drippy), Bobby Jordan (Angel), Leo Gorcey (Spit), Gabriel Dell (T. B.), Bernard Punsley (Milty), Ward Bond (doorman); Running time: 93 minutes; Oscar nominations: Best Picture; Best Supporting Actress (Claire Trevor); Best Cinematography; Best Art Direction Jezebel (Warner Brothers, 1938) Executive producer: Hal B. Wallis; Associate producer: Henry Blanke; Screenplay: Clements Ripley, Abem Finkel, and John Huston from the unpublished play Jezebel by Owen Davis Sr.; Cinematographer: Ernest Haller; Art director: Robert Haas; Costumes: Orry-Kelly; Music: Max Steiner; Editor: Warren Low; Cast: Bette Davis (Julie), Henry Fonda (Preston Dillard), George Brent (Buck Cantrell), Margaret Lindsay (Amy), Donald Crisp (Dr. Livingston), Fay Bainter (Aunt Belle), Richard Cromwell (Ted Dillard), Henry O’Neill (General Bogardus), Spring Byington (Mrs. Kendrick), John

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Litel ( Jean La Cour), Theresa Harris (Zette), Irving Pichel (Huger), Lew Payton (Uncle Cato), Eddie Anderson (Gros Bat), Stymie Beard (Ti Bat); Running time: 103 minutes; Oscars: Best Actress (Bette Davis); Best Supporting Actress (Fay Bainter); Oscar nominations: Best Picture; Best Cinematography; Best Musical Score Wuthering Heights (Samuel Goldwyn/United Artists, 1939) Producer: Samuel Goldwyn; Screenplay: Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (and John Huston, uncredited), from Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights; Cinematographer: Gregg Toland; Art director: James Basevi; Costumes: Omar Kiam; Music: Alfred Newman; Editor: Daniel Mandell; Cast: Merle Oberon (Catherine Earnshaw), Laurence Olivier (Heathcliff ), David Niven (Edgar Linton), Flora Robson (Ellen Dean), Donald Crisp (Dr. Kenneth), Hugh Williams (Hindley Earnshaw), Geraldine Fitzgerald (Isabella Linton), Leo G. Carroll ( Joseph), Miles Mander (Lockwood), Cecil Kellaway (Mr. Earnshaw), Rex Downing (Heathcliff as a child), Sarita Wooton (Cathy as a child) Douglas Scott (Hindley as a child), Mme. Alice Ehlers (Harpsichordist); Running time: 103 minutes; Oscar: Best Cinematography; Oscar nominations: Best Picture; Best Actor (Laurence Olivier); Best Supporting Actress (Geraldine Fitzgerald); Best Director; Best Screenplay; Best Art Direction; Best Musical Score; New York Critics Award: Best Picture The Westerner (Samuel Goldwyn/United Artists, 1940) Producer: Samuel Goldwyn; Screenplay: Jo Swerling and Niven Busch, from a story by Stuart N. Lake; Cinematographer: Gregg Toland; Art director: James Basevi; Costumes: Irene Saltern; Music: Dimitri Tiomkin [Alfred Newman, uncredited]; Editor: Daniel Mandell; Cast: Gary Cooper (Cole Hardin), Walter Brennan ( Judge Roy Bean), Fred Stone (Caliphet Matthews), Doris Davenport ( JaneEllen Matthews), Forrest Tucker (Wade Harper), Lilian Bond (Lillie Langtry), Paul Hurst (Chickenfoot), Chill Wills (Southeast), Charles Halton (Mort Borrow), Dana Andrews (Bart Cobble); Running time: 99 minutes; Oscar: Best Supporting Actor (Walter Brennan); Oscar nomination: Best Original Story (Stuart N. Lake) The Letter (Warner Brothers, 1940) Executive producer: Hal B. Wallis; Screenplay: Howard Koch, from W. Somerset Maugham’s play The Letter (1927); Cinematographer: Tony Gaudio; Art director: Carl Jules Weyl; Costumes: Orry-Kelly; Music: Max Steiner; Orchestral arrangements: Hugo Friedhofer; Editors: George Amy & Warren Low; Cast: Bette Davis (Leslie Crosbie), Herbert Marshall (Robert Crosbie), James Stephenson (Howard Joyce), Frieda Inescort (Dorothy Joyce), Gale Sondergaard

(Mrs. Hammond), Bruce Lester (John Withers), Sen Yung (Ong Chi Seng); Running time: 95 minutes; Oscar nominations: Best Picture; Best Actress (Bette Davis); Best Supporting Actor ( James Stephenson); Best Supporting Actress (Gale Sondergaard); Best Cinematography; Best Musical Score; Best Editing The Little Foxes (Samuel Goldwyn / RKO, 1941) Producer: Samuel Goldwyn; Screenplay: Lillian Hellman, from her play The Little Foxes (1939); Additional scenes and dialogue: Arthur Kober, Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell; Cinematographer: Gregg Toland; Art director: Stephen Goosson; Costumes: Orry-Kelly; Music: Meredith Willson; Editor: Daniel Mandell; Cast: Bette Davis (Regina Giddens), Herbert Marshall (Horace Giddens), Teresa Wright (Alexandra Giddens), Patricia Collinge (Birdie Hubbard), Dan Duryea (Leo Hubbard), Charles Dingle (Ben Hubbard), Carl Benton Reid (Oscar Hubbard), Jessie Grayson (Addie), Richard Carlson (David Hewitt), John Marriott (Cal), Russell Hicks (Mr. Marshall), Lucien Littlefield (Manders); Running time: 116 minutes; Oscar nominations: Best Picture; Best Actress (Bette Davis); Best Supporting Actress (Patricia Collinge); Best Supporting Actress (Teresa Wright); Best Director; Best Screenplay; Best Editing; Best Musical Score; Best Art Direction. Mrs. Miniver (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1942) Producer: Sidney Franklin; Screenplay: Arthur Wimperis, George Froeschel, James Hilton, and Claudine West, from Jan Struther’s Mrs. Miniver (1939); Cinematographer: Joseph Ruttenberg; Art directors: Cedric Gibbons, Urie McCleary; Costumes: Kalloch, Gile Steele; Music: Herbert Stothart; St Luke’s Choristers, Ripley Dorr, Director (Song “Midsummer’s Day” by Gene Lockhart); Editor: Harold F. Kress; Cast: Greer Garson (Mrs. Miniver), Walter Pidgeon (Clem Miniver), Teresa Wright (Carol Beldon), Dame May Whitty (Lady Beldon), Reginald Owen (Foley), Henry Travers (Mr. Ballard), Richard Ney (Vin Miniver), Brenda Forbes (Gladys), Christopher Severn (Toby Miniver), Clare Sanders ( Judy Miniver), Marie De Becker (Ada), Helmut Dantine (German Flyer), Henry Wilcoxon (Vicar); Running time: 134 minutes; Oscars: Best Picture; Best Actress (Greer Garson); Best Supporting Actress (Teresa Wright); Best Director; Best Screenplay; Best Cinematography; Oscar nominations: Best Actor (Walter Pidgeon); Best Supporting Actor (Henry Travers); Best Supporting Actress (Dame May Whitty); Best Editing; Best Sound Recording (Douglas Shearer); Best Special Effects (A. Arnold Gillespie, Warren Newcombe, Douglas Shearer) The Memphis Belle (Paramount, 1944) Producers: William Wyler and the War Activities Committee; Narration: Lester Koenig; Narrators: Eugene Kern and John Beal; Cinematographers: William Wyler, William C. Clothier, and Harold

Filmography and Awards Tannenbaum; Music: Gail Kubik; Editor: Lynn Harrison; Running time: 41 minutes; Thunderbolt (Monogram, 1945; released 1947) Producer: Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker and the USAAF; Script: Lester Koenig; Introduction: James Stewart; Narrators: Eugene Kern and Lloyd Bridges; Cinematographer: William Wyler; Music: Gail Kubik; Editors: William Wyler and John Sturges; Running time: 44 minutes The Best Years of Our Lives (Samuel Goldwyn / RKO, 1946) Producer: Samuel Goldwyn; Screenplay: Robert E. Sherwood, from MacKinlay Kantor’s novel Glory for Me (1943); Cinematographer: Gregg Toland; Art directors: Perry Ferguson and George Jenkins; Costumes: Irene Sharaff; Music: Hugo Friedhofer; Editor: Daniel Mandell; Cast: Fredric March (Al Stephenson), Myrna Loy (Millie Stephenson), Dana Andrews (Fred Derry), Teresa Wright (Peggy Stephenson), Virginia Mayo (Marie Derry), Cathy O’Donnell (Wilma Cameron), Hoagy Carmichael (Butch Engle), Harold Russell (Homer Parrish), Gladys George (Hortense Derry), Roman Bohnen (Pat Derry), Ray Collins (Mr. Milton), Steve Cochran (Cliff ), Minna Gombell (Mrs. Parrish), Walter Baldwin (Mr. Parrish), Dorothy Adams (Mrs. Cameron), Don Beddoe (Mr. Cameron), Erskine Sandford (Bullard), Marlene Aarmes (Luella Parrish), Michael Hall (Rob Stephenson), Ray Teal (Mr. Mollett); Running time: 172 minutes; Oscars: Best Picture; Best Actor (Fredric March); Best Supporting Actor (Harold Russell); Best Director; Best Screenplay; Best Musical Score; Best Editing; Oscar nomination: Sound Recording (Gordon Sawyer); New York Critics Award: Best Picture; British Film Academy: Best Film from any source The Heiress (Paramount, 1949) Producer: William Wyler; Screenplay: Ruth and Augustus Goetz, from their play and the novel Washington Square (1881) by Henry James; Cinematographer: Leo Tover; Production designer: Harry Horner; Art director: John Meehan; Costumes: Edith Head; Music: Aaron Copland; Editor: William Hornbeck; Cast: Olivia de Havilland (Catherine Sloper), Ralph Richardson (Dr. Austin Sloper), Montgomery Clift (Morris Townsend), Miriam Hopkins (Lavinia Penniman), Vanessa Brown (Maria), Mona Freeman (Marian Almond), Betty Linley (Mrs. Montgomery), Ray Collins ( Jefferson Almond), Selena Royle (Elizabeth Almond); Running time: 115 minutes; Oscars: Best Actress (Olivia de Havilland); Best Art Direction; Best Musical Score; Best Costume Design (Edith Head and Gile Steele); Oscar nominations: Best Picture; Best Supporting Actor (Ralph Richardson); Best Director; Best Cinematography Detective Story (Paramount, 1951) Producer: William Wyler; Associate producers: Robert Wyler and Lester Koenig; Screenplay: Philip

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Yordan and Robert Wyler, from the play by Sidney Kingsley; Cinematographer: Lee Garmes; Art directors: Hal Pereira and Earl Hedrick; Costumes: Edith Head; Editor: Robert Swink; Cast: Kirk Douglas (James McLeod), Eleanor Parker (Mary McLeod), William Bendix (Lou Brody), Lee Grant (shoplifter), Bert Freed (Dakis), Frank Faylen (Gallagher), William Philips (Callahan), Grandon Rhodes (O’Brien), Luis van Rooten (Feinson), Cathy O’Donnell (Susan Carmichael), Horace McMahon (Lt. Monaghan), Warner Anderson (Endicott Sims), George Macready (Schneider), Craig Hill (Arthur Kindred), Joseph Wiseman (Charles Gennini), Michael Strong (Lewis Abbott), Gerald Mohr (Tami Giacopetti), James Maloney (Mr. Prichett), Gladys George (Miss Hatch); Running time: 103 minutes; Oscar nominations: Best Actress (Eleanor Parker); Best Supporting (Lee Grant); Best Director; Best Screenplay; Cannes Film Festival Award: Best Actress (Lee Grant) Carrie (Paramount, 1952) Producer: William Wyler; Associate producer: Lester Koenig; Screenplay: Ruth and Augustus Goetz, from Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900); Cinematographer: Victor Milner; Art directors: Hal Pereira and Roland Anderson; Costumes: Edith Head; Music: David Raksin; Editor: Robert Swink; Cast: Laurence Olivier (George Hurstwood), Jennifer Jones (Carrie Meeber), Miriam Hopkins ( Julia Hurstwood), Eddie Albert (Charles Drouet), Basil Ruysdael (Mr. Fitzgerald), Ray Teal (Allen), Barry Kelley (Slawson), Sara Berner (Mrs. Oransky), William Reynolds (George Hurstwood, Jr.), Mary Murphy ( Jessica Hurstwood), Charles Halton (factory foreman), Walter Baldwin (Carrie’s father), Dorothy Adams (Carrie’s mother), Jacqueline de Wit (Carrie’s sister, Minnie); Running time: 118 minutes; Oscar nominations: Best Art Direction; Best Costume Design Roman Holiday (Paramount, 1953) Producer: William Wyler; Associate producer: Robert Wyler; Screenplay: Ian McLellan Hunter and John Dighton (Dalton Trumbo, Ben Hecht, uncredited); story by Ian McLellan Hunter; Cinematography: Franz F. Planer and Henri Alekan; Art directors: Hal Pereira and Walter Tyler; Costumes: Edith Head; Music: Georges Auric; Editor: Robert Swink; Cast: Gregory Peck ( Joe Bradley), Audrey Hepburn (Princess Anne), Eddie Albert (Irving Radovich), Hartley Power (Mr. Hennessey), Harcourt Williams (Ambassador), Margaret Rawlings (Countess Vereberg), Tullio Carminati (General Provno), Paolo Carlini (Mario Delani), Claudio Ermelli (Giovanni); Running time: 119 minutes; Oscars: Best Actress (Audrey Hepburn); Best Story (Ian McLellan Hunter: posthumously awarded to actual author Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted); Best Costume Design; Oscar nominations: Best Picture; Best Sup-

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porting Actor (Eddie Albert); Best Director; Best Screenplay; Best Cinematography; Best Art Direction; Best Film Editing The Desperate Hours (Paramount, 1955) Producer: William Wyler; Associate producer: Robert Wyler; Screenplay: Joseph Hayes, adapted from his novel and play; Photography: Lee Garmes; Art directors: Hal Pereira and Joseph MacMillan Johnson; Costumes: Edith Head; Music: Gail Kubik; Editor: Robert Swink; Cast: Fredric March (Dan Hilliard), Humphrey Bogart (Glenn Griffin), Martha Scott (Eleanor Hilliard), Arthur Kennedy ( Jesse Bard), Dewey Martin (Hal Griffin), Gig Young (Chuck), Mary Murphy (Cindy Hilliard), Richard Eyer (Ralphie Hilliard), Robert Middleton (Sam Kobish), Bert Freed (Winston), Ray Collins (Sheriff Masters), Alan Reed (detective), Whit Bissell (Carson), Beverley Garland (Miss Swift), Walter Baldwin (Patterson); Running time: 112 minutes Friendly Persuasion (Allied Artists, 1956) Producer: William Wyler; Associate producer: Robert Wyler; Assistant to the producer: Stuart Millar; Screenplay: [Michael Wilson, Jessamyn West, Robert Wyler, all uncredited; based on the collected stories, The Friendly Persuasion by Jessamyn West]; Cinematographer: Ellsworth Fredricks; Art director: Edward S. Haworth; Costumes: Dorothy Jeakins; Technical adviser: Jessamyn West; Music: Dimitri Tiomkin (Songs “Friendly Persuasion,” “Mocking Bird in a Willow Tree,” “Marry Me, Marry Me,” “Coax Me a Little,” “Indiana Holiday,” music by Dimitri Tiomkin, lyrics by Paul Francis Webster); Editors: Robert Swink, Edward A. Biery, Jr., Robert Belcher; Cast: Gary Cooper (Jess Birdwell), Dorothy McGuire (Eliza Birdwell), Marjorie Main (Widow Hudspeth), Anthony Perkins (Josh Birdwell), Robert Middleton (Sam Jordan), Walter Catlett (Professor Quigley), Richard Eyer (Little Jess), Phyllis Love (Mattie Birdwell), Mark Richman (Gard Jordan), Joel Fluellen (Enoch), Theodore Newton (Major Harvey); Running time: 139 minutes; Oscar nominations: Best Picture; Best Supporting Actor (Anthony Perkins); Best Director; Best Screenplay (ineligible because of Michael Wilson’s blacklisting); Best Song (“Friendly Persuasion”); Best Sound Recording (Gordon Glennan and Gordon Sawyer; Winner of Palme D’Or at Cannes Film Festival 1957. The Big Country (United Artists, 1958) Producers: William Wyler and Gregory Peck; Associate producer: Robert Wyler; Screenplay: James R. Webb, Sy Bartlett, and Robert Wyler, from the story Ambush at Blanco Canyon by Donald Hamilton; Adaptation by Jessamyn West and Robert Wyler; Cinematographer: Franz F. Planer; Art director: Frank Hotaling; Costumes: Emile Santiago and Yvonne Wood; Music: Jerome Moross; Supervising editor: Robert Swink; Editors: Robert Belcher and John Faure; Cast:

Gregory Peck (James McKay), Jean Simmons (Julie Maragon), Carroll Baker (Pat Terrill), Charlton Heston (Steve Leech), Burl Ives (Rufus Hannassey), Charles Bickford (Major Henry Terrill), Chuck Connors (Buck Hannassey), Alfonso Bedoya (Ramon); Running time: 166 minutes; Oscar: Best Supporting Actor (Burl Ives); Oscar nomination: Best Music Score; Directors Guild nomination: Best Director; Kinema Jumpo Awards ( Japan): Best Picture: Best Direction; Tokyo Motion Picture Fans Association: Best Direction; Films and Filming Magazine Award, U.K.: Best Film of the Year Ben-Hur (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1959) Producer: Sam Zimbalist; Second unit directors: Andrew Marton, Yakima Canutt, Mario Soldati (Richard Thorpe, uncredited); Screenplay: Karl Tunberg (Christopher Fry, S. N. Berhman, Gore Vidal, uncredited), from Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880); Cinematographer: Robert L. Surtees; Additional photography: Harold E. Wellman, Pietro Portalupi; Special photographic effects: A. Arnold Gillespie, Lee LeBlanc, Robert R. Hoag; Art directors: William A. Horning, Edward Carfagno; Costumes: Elizabeth Haffenden; Music: Miklos Rozsa; Editors: Ralph E. Winters, John D. Dunning; Sound recordists: Sash Fisher and William Steinkamp; Cast: Charlton Heston ( Judah Ben-Hur), Jack Hawkins (Quintus Arrius), Stephen Boyd (Messala), Haya Harareet (Esther), Hugh Griffith (Sheik Ilderim), Martha Scott (Miriam), Sam Jaffe (Simonides), Cathy O’Donnell (Tirzah), Finlay Currie (Balthasar), Frank Thring (Pontius Pilate), George Relph (Emperor Tiberius), Claude Heater (The Christ), Terence Longdon (Drusus), Andre Morell (Sextus), Laurence Payne ( Joseph), Jose Greci (Mary), John Le Mesurier (doctor); Running time: 212 minutes; Oscars: Best Picture; Best Actor (Charlton Heston); Best Supporting Actor (Hugh Griffith); Best Director; Best Cinematography; Best Art Direction; Best Music Score; Best Editing; Best Sound recording; Best Costume Design; Best Special Effects; Oscar nomination: Best Screenplay; New York Film Critics Award: Best Film; British Film Academy Award: Best Film from any Source; Directors Guild nomination: Best Direction; The Children’s Hour (United Artists, 1961) Producer: William Wyler; Associate producer: Robert WylerScreenplay: John Michael Hayes; Adaptation: Lillian Hellman, from her play The Children’s Hour (1934); Cinematographer: Franz F. Planer; Art director: Fernando Carrere, Edward G. Boyle; Costumes: Dorothy Jeakins; Music: Alex North; Editor: Robert Swink; Assistant editor: Hal Ashby; Cast: Audrey Hepburn (Karen Wright), Shirley MacLaine (Martha Dobie), James Garner (Dr. Joe Cardin), Miriam Hopkins (Mrs. Lily Mortar), Fay Bainter (Mrs. Amelia Tilford), Karen Balkin (Mary Tilford), Veronica Cartwright (Rosalie), Jered Barclay (grocery boy);

Filmography and Awards Running time: 107 minutes; Oscar nominations: Best Supporting Actress (Fay Bainter); Best Cinematography; Best Art Direction: Best Costume Design; Best Sound Recording (Gordon Sawyer); Directors Guild nomination: Best Director; Hollywood Foreign Press Association nomination: Best Director The Collector (Columbia, 1965) Producers: Jud Kinberg and John Kohn; Screenplay: Stanley Mann and John Kohn, from the novel The Collector (1963) by John Fowles; Cinematographers: Robert L. Surtees in Hollywood and Robert Krasker in England; Art director: John Stoll; Drawings: Robin Vaccarino; Music: Maurice Jarre; Editor and second unit director: Robert Swink; Cast: Terence Stamp (Freddie Clegg), Samantha Eggar (Miranda Grey), Mona Washbourne (Aunt Annie), Maurice Dallimore (The Neighbor); Running time: 119 minutes; Oscar nominations: Best Actress (Samantha Eggar); Best Director; Best Screenplay; Cannes Film Festival awards 1965: Best Actor (Terence Stamp); Best Actress (Samantha Eggar); Hollywood Foreign Press Association nomination: Best Director How to Steal a Million (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1966) Producer: Fred Kohlmar; Screenplay: Harry Kurnitz, from the story “Venus Rising” by George Bradshaw; Cinematographer: Charles Lang; Production designer: Alexander Trauner; Miss Hepburn’s clothes: Givenchy; Miss Hepburn’s jewelry: Cartier; Music: Johnny [John] Williams; Editor and second unit director: Robert Swink; Cast: Audrey Hepburn (Nicole Bonnet), Peter O’Toole (Simon Dermott), Eli Wallach (David Leland), Hugh Griffith (Charles Bonnet), Charles Boyer (De Solnay), Fernard Gravey (Grammont), Marcel Dalio (Señor Parvideo), Jacques Marin (chief guard), Moustache (guard); Running time: 127 minutes Funny Girl (Columbia, 1968) Producer: Ray Stark; Musical numbers directed by: Herbert Ross; Screenplay: Isobel Lennart, from the play Funny Girl (1964) by Isobel Lennart, Bob Merrill, and Jule Styne; Cinematographer: Harry Stradling; Production designer: Gene Callahan; Art director: Robert Luthardt; Barbra Streisand’s costumes: Irene Sharaff; Music: Jule Styne; Lyrics: Bob Merrill; Additional songs: “I’d Rather be Blue” by Fred Fisher, Billy Rose; “Second Hand Rose” by James F. Hanley, Grant Clarke; “My Man” by Maurice Yvain, A. Willemetz, Jacques Charles, English adaptation by Channing Pollock; Music supervised and conducted by: Walter Scharf; Supervising film editor: Robert

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Swink; Editors: Maury Winetrobe and William Sands; Cast: Barbra Streisand (Fanny Brice), Omar Sharif (Nick Arnstein), Kay Medford (Rose Brice), Anne Francis (Georgia James), Walter Pidgeon (Florenz Ziegfeld), Lee Allen (Eddie Ryan), Mae Questel (Mrs. Strakosh), Gerald Mohr (Branca), Frank Faylen (Keeney); Running time: 151 minutes; Oscar: Best Actress (Barbra Streisand); Oscar nominations: Best Picture; Best Supporting Actress (Kay Medford); Best Cinematography; Best Sound Recording; Best Song (“Funny Girl”); Best Musical Supervision; Best Editing; Directors Guild nomination: Best Director; Hollywood Foreign Press Association nomination: Best Director The Liberation of L.B. Jones (Columbia, 1970) Producer: Ronald Lubin; Second unit director: Robert Swink; Screenplay: Stirling Silliphant and Jesse Hill Ford, from Jesse Hill Ford’s novel The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones (1965); Cinematographer: Robert Surtees; Production designer: Kenneth A. Reid; Music: Elmer Bernstein; Supervising film editor: Robert Swink; Film editor: Carl Kress; Cast: Lee J. Cobb (Oman Hedgepath), Anthony Zerbe (Willie Joe Worth), Roscoe Lee Browne (Lord Byron Jones), Lola Falana (Emma Jones), Lee Majors (Steve Mundine), Barbara Hershey (Nella Mundine), Yaphet Kotto (Sonny Boy Mosby), Arch Johnson (Stanley Bumpas), Chill Wills (Mr. Ike), Zara Cully (Mama Lavorn), Fayard Nicholas (Benny), Dub Taylor (Mayor), Brenda Sykes ( Jelly), Ray Teal (Chief of Police); Running time: 102 minutes

Television The Letter (1956) Production company: NBC; Director: William Wyler; Television director: Kirk Browning; From the play by W. Somerset Maugham; Cast: Siobhan McKenna (Leslie Crosbie), John Mills (Robert Crosbie), Michael Rennie (Howard Joyce), Anna May Wong (Mrs. Hammond); Broadcast October 15, 1956, on NBC’s Producer’s Showcase.

Special Awards Life Achievement Award, American Film Institute, 1976 Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, for consistent high quality of production achievement, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1966 D.W. Griffith Award, Directors Guild, for distinguished achievement in motion picture direction, 1966

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Crowe, Cameron. 1999. Conversations with Wilder. London: Faber & Faber. Davis, Bette. 1962. The Lonely Life. London: MacDonald. Dick, Bernard F. 2002. Anatomy of Film, 4th ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press. _____. 1982. Hellman in Hollywood. Associated University Presses. Dreiser, Theodore. 1958. Sister Carrie. 1900. New York: Bantam. Dunne, Philip. 1980. Take Two: A Life in Movies and Politics. New York: McGraw-Hill. Durgnat, Raymond. 1967. Films and Feelings. London: Faber & Faber. Dyer, Richard. 2002. The Matter of Images, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Easton, Carol. 1976. The Search for Sam Goldwyn. New York: Morrow. Elley, Derek. 1984. The Epic Film: Myth and History. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. _____. 1978. “Interview with John Williams.” Films and Filming, August, pp. 29–33. Everson, William K., and George N. Fenin. 1977. The Western. London: Penguin. Farmer, Frances. 1974. Will There Really Be a Morning? London: Allison & Busby. Forster, E.M. 1951. Two Cheers for Democracy. London: Edward Arnold. Fowles, John. 1963. The Collector. London: Jonathan Cape. _____. 2003. The Journals, vol. I. London: Jonathan Cape. Frayling, Christopher. 2000. Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death. London: Faber & Faber. French, Philip. 1973. Westerns. London: Secker & Warburg. Giannetti, Louis D. 1981. Masters of the American Cinema. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Glancy, H. Mark. 1999. When Hollywood Loved Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Goodman, Ezra. 1962. The Fifty-Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood. New York: Macfadden. Gow, Gordon. 1971. Hollywood in the Fifties. London: A. Zwemmer.

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Index Page numbers in bold italics indicate illustrations. Aames, Marlene 105 Ace in the Hole 133, 144 The Actress 165 Adams, Lee 217 Advise and Consent 205 Age of Innocence 122 Agee, James 100, 102, 103, 108, 110, 112, 118 Albert, Eddie 139, 140, 145, 148 Alekan, Henri 147 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 95, 96 All Quiet on the Western Front 165 All the King’s Men 123 Allen, Lewis 158 An American Tragedy 137 Among the Porcupines 54 Anderson, Lindsay 222 Anderson, Robert 165 Anderson, Warner 132 Andrews, Dana 9, 62, 104, 107, 112, 116, 133 Angels with Dirty Faces 49 Anstey, Edgar 94 Antonioni, Michelangelo 227 The Apartment 204, 212 Arnold, Edward 46, 48 Arthur, Jean 161 Ashbrook, Harry 94 Ashcroft, Peggy 124 Astor, Mary 35, 40, 45 Auden, W. H. 99, 193 Avanti! 153 Ayres, Lew 165 Bacall, Lauren 153 The Bad and the Beautiful 212 Bad Companions 31 The Bad Seed 202 Bainter, Fay 35, 68, 70, 76, 148, 196, 200, 203, 204 Baker, Carroll 72, 170, 171, 175 Baker, Peter 9, 170 Balaban, Barney 139 Baldwin, James 51 Baldwin, Walter 158 Balkin, Karen 199, 202, 203 Bankhead, Tallulah 68, 85, 90

Barbary Coast 45 Barrie, Wendy 52 Barrymore, John 23, 30 Bass, Saul 169 The Battle of Midway 100 The Battle of San Pietro 100 Baxter, John 32, 46 Bazin, Andre 2, 3, 63, 71, 84, 87, 89, 102, 112, 113, 114, 118, 120, 187, 227 Beaton, Cecil 204 Beauty and the Beast 147 Bedoya, Alfonso 175 Beethoven, Ludwig van 117, 215 Behold a Pale Horse 216 Bellamy, Ralph 132 Ben-Hur 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 93, 127, 135, 162, 163, 166, 181–193, 182, 189, 197, 206, 211, 213, 228 Ben-Hur (silent version) 12, 185, 190, 191 Bendix, William 132 Bergman, Ingmar 167, 222, 227 Bergman, Ingrid 94, 165 Berkeley, Martin 146 Bernstein, Elmer 224 Bernstein, Leonard 169 Bernstein, Walter 61, 63, 121 Berry, John 159 The Best Years of Our Lives 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 24, 29, 51, 93, 102–119, 103, 121, 123, 179 Bickford, Charles 17, 171 Bicycle Thieves 14 Bieslawski, Richard 16 The Big Country 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 17, 66, 72, 73, 97, 127, 147, 162, 163, 166, 168–181, 197, 209, 213, 219, 228 Billington, Michael 137, 139, 144, 145 Billy Budd 208 Bing, Rudolf 194 The Birth of a Nation 4 The Bishop’s Wife 105 Black Narcissus 102 Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife 153 Body and Soul 14

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Boetticher, Budd 64 Bogart, Humphrey 7, 50, 94, 153, 154, 155, 156, 212, 214, 222 Bohnen, Roman 108, 116 Boone, Pat 166 Boone, Richard 183 Borzage, Frank 25 Boyd, Stephen 183, 184, 185, 186, 190, 191 Boyer, Charles 52, 213 Bradshaw, George 211 Brando, Marlon 216 The Bravados 175 The Brave One 146, 167 Brennan, Walter 20, 31, 46, 48, 61, 63, 65 Brent, George 69, 74, 75 Brief Encounter 9, 221 Briggs, Harlan 36 Brodine, Norbert 25 Brontë, Emily 52, 60, 227 Brown, Tom 22 Brown, Vanessa 130 Browne, Roscoe Lee 222, 223 Buñuel, Luis 222, 227 A Burnt-out Case 184 Byington, Spring 36 Cabaret 221 The Caine Mutiny 155 Callas, Maria 67 Camille 73 Campbell, Alan 85 Candide 169 Cantor, Eddie 29 Canutt, Yakima 189 Capra, Frank 7, 26, 45, 48, 146, 161, 166 Caps, John 179 Carlson, Richard 84 Carmichael, Hoagy 107 Carrie 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 47, 120, 121, 136, 137–145, 138, 156, 210, 215 Carroll, Leo G. 54 Carroll, Lewis 96 Cartlett, Walter 164 Cartwright, Veronica 199, 202

244 Casablanca 94 The Catcher in the Rye 209 Caton-Jones, Michael 227 Cavalcanti, Alberto 94 Champion 132 Champlin, Charles 225 Chandler, Helen 18, 21 Chaney, Lon 12 Chaplin, Charles 2, 6, 11, 12, 13, 66, 99, 111, 140, 144, 169, 218, 222 Charade 211 Chatterton, Ruth 35, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43 The Children’s Hour 5, 6, 7, 8, 32, 34, 35, 111, 147, 149, 194– 206, 195, 227 The Children’s Hour (play) 31, 32, 194, 196–199, 202 Christians, Mady 46 Christie, Julie 210 Christmas in July 26 Churchill, Winston 94 Cimino, Michael 160 Citizen Kane 51, 139 Clift, Montgomery 125 Clothier, William 92 Cloutier, Suzanne 148 Clyman, John B. 18 Cobb, Lee J. 222, 223 Cocteau, Jean 147, 180 Cohn, Harry 11 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 202 The Collector 7, 8, 9, 71, 156, 194, 206–211 Collinge, Patricia 85, 87 Collins, Ray 110 Colman, Ronald 29 Colpi, Henri 69 Come and Get It 45–48, 127 Connery, Sean 136 Connors, Chuck 170 Cooke, Alistair 33 Cooke, Mervyn 180 Cooper, Gary 29, 61, 62, 63, 65, 85, 162, 163, 164, 166, 178, 193 Cooper, Gladys 79 Cooper, Jackie 23 Copland, Aaron 9, 121, 126, 128, 129, 179 Coppola, Francis Ford 103 Cornell, Katherine 79 Counsellor at Law 8, 23–25, 30, 132 Cowie, Peter 120 Crisp, Donald 59, 70 Cromwell, Richard 22, 70 Crosby, Bing 161 The Crowd 14 Crowe, Cameron 5, 115 Crowther, Bosley 195, 196 Cruise, Tom 122 Cukor, George 165 Cunningham, Cecil 47

Index Currie, Finlay 184 Curtiz, Michael 49, 180 Dallimore, Maurice 210 Dangerous 67 Daniels, Bebe 23, 24 Dantine, Helmut 98 Dark Angel 32 Dassin, Jules 211 Davenport, Doris 62 Davis, Bette 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 18, 35, 48, 57, 67–91, 216, 219, 220 Davis, Owen, Sr. 68 Day, Richard 29, 30, 34, 49 The Day of the Locust 23 The Days I Knew 66 Daze in the West 13 Dead End 5, 7, 8, 9, 30, 49–52, 155, 156 Dead End Kids 49 Dean, James 165 Death in Venice 69 Death of a Salesman 155 Debussy, Claude 40 Dee, Frances 27, 28 De Havilland, Olivia 123, 124, 126, 129 De Mille, Cecil B. 13 De Sica, Vittorio 14 Desire under the Elms 18 The Desperate Hours 5, 7, 8, 9, 120, 127, 153–160, 154, 163, 222, 227 Detective Story 5, 120, 131–136, 144 Diary of a Sergeant 105 Dick, Bernard F. 195, 197, 199 Dickens, Charles 170 Dickinson, Thorold 148 Dieterle, William 18 Dingle, Charles 85 Directed by William Wyler v, 25, 93, 225 Dr. Doolittle 216 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 155 Dodsworth 5, 8, 9, 12, 34–45, 54 Donen, Stanley 211, 218 Don’t Shoot 13 Double Indemnity 50, 87, 110 Douglas, Kirk 5, 131 Douglas, Melvyn 23 Douglass, Kent 18, 21 Dunne, Philip 92, 194 Durgnat, Raymond 63 Duryea, Dan 85, 88 Dyer, Richard 73 Eagels, Jeanne 79 Eastwood, Clint 136, 170 Edens, Olive 18 Edwards, Blake 211 Eggar, Samantha 207, 210 Eisenstein, Sergei 86, 89, 228

Elley, Derek 182, 186, 192 Ellis, Robert 15 The End of the Affair 183 Engle, Billy 13 The Europeans 43 Executive Suite 155 The Exorcist 8 Eyer, Richard 159, 163 Eyes Without a Face 210 F for Fake 214, 215 Falana, Lola 222 Farmer, Frances 46, 48 Faylen, Frank 134, 218 Fellini, Federico 2 Ferber, Edna 45, 46, 47 Ferguson, Otis 25, 88 Fiedler, Leslie 4 Field, Connie 111 Finian’s Rainbow 216 Finkel, Abel 68 The Fire Barrier 13 Fitzgerald, Geraldine 53, 59 Fitzgerald, William 183 Fleischer, Richard 216 Flynn, Errol 125 Fonda, Henry 9, 22, 57, 69, 72, 223 Fonda, Jane 33 Ford, Jesse Hill 221, 222, 225 Ford, John 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 16, 45, 65, 66, 87, 92, 93, 100, 113, 194 Foreign Correspondent 99 Forster, E. M. vi, 94, 205 Fosse, Bob 221 Fowles, John 122, 206, 210, 211 Franju, Georges 210 Frankenheimer, John 103 Frankenstein 208 Franklin, Sidney 95 Freeman, Kathleen 210 Freeman, Mona 125 Freeman, Y. Frank 122, 136, 146 The French Connection 136 Frieda 102 Friedhofer, Hugo 9, 107, 108, 116, 117, 179 Friendly Persuasion 1, 3, 7, 9, 97, 127, 161–167, 178, 193 Fry, Christopher 4, 168, 179, 184 Funny Girl 7, 194, 215–221 Funny Lady 217 The Furies 21 Gambit 211 Garbo, Greta 52, 150 Garmes, Lee 131 Garner, James 7, 195, 200, 201 Garson, Greer 94, 97, 98 Gaudio, Tony 81 The Gay Deception 9, 13, 26, 27– 28, 119 Gaye, Gregory 38 George, Gladys 108

Index Giannetti, Louis 120, 121, 167 Gielgud, John 124 Gilbert, John 52 Gilliat, Penelope 196 Ginsberg, Henry 122 Girl of the Golden West 194 Glamour 13, 46 Glancy, H Mark 95, 96 Glenville, Peter 208 The Godfather 159 Goetz, Augustus 123, 130, 138, 139 Goetz, Ruth 11, 123, 130, 138, 139 Goldwyn, Sam 4, 5, 18, 24, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 45, 46, 49, 52, 62, 84, 85, 93, 105, 106, 119, 211, 225 Goldwyn, Samuel, Jr. 180 Gone with the Wind 52, 53, 69, 124 The Good Fairy 9, 25–27 Goodbye Mr Chips 95 Gorbachev, Mikhail 167 Gow, Gordon 153, 162 Grant, Cary 147, 214 Grant, Lee 131, 132, 136 Granville, Bonita 30, 32, 33, 202 The Great Dictator 66, 99 Great Expectations 170, 207 Greed 17 Greene, Graham 30, 33, 49, 60, 183 Grierson, John 2 Griffin, Sean 205 Griffith, Hugh 1, 184, 192, 211, 213 Griffith, Richard 119 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner 222 Hackman, Gene 136 Haire-Sargeant, Lin 60 Hale, Alan 26 Hall, Michael 105 Halop, Billy 49 Halton, Charles 64 Hamilton, Neil 15 Hammett, Dashiell 31, 131 Hanlon, Jack 14 Hanson, Curtis 27, 181 Harareet, Haya v, 14, 184, 188 Harris, Jed 124 Harris, Theresa 73 Harrison, Rex 214 Hartman, Don 28, 120, 160 A Hatful of Rain 158 Hatton, Raymond 17 Hawkins, Jack 186 Hawks, Howard 2, 6, 7, 23, 27, 45, 46, 47, 48, 85, 125 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 78 Hayes, Helen 26 Hayes, John Michael 196, 198, 201, 202, 205

Hayes, Joseph 153, 156 Hayward, Brooke 25 He Ran All the Way 159 Heater, Claude 188 Hecht, Ben 29, 52 Heifetz, Jascha 12 The Heiress 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 73, 78, 91, 120, 121, 122–130, 123, 134, 142, 149, 225 Hellman, Lillian 2, 3, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 50, 51, 84, 85, 86, 87, 90, 93, 121, 137, 194, 195, 227 Hell’s Heroes 16–18, 65 Henry V 220 Hepburn, Audrey 6, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 195, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 204, 205, 206, 211, 212, 213, 214, 216 Hepburn, Katharine 52, 165, 216 Her First Mate 13 Herman, Jan 15, 16, 40, 62, 78, 115, 131, 160, 166, 225 Herrmann, Bernard 179, 210 Hershey, Barbara 223 Heston, Charlton 3, 12, 170, 171, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 187, 188, 189, 192, 228 Hicks, Russell 86 High Noon 111, 169, 178 High Sierra 50, 155 Higham, Charles 79, 147 Hill, Craig 132 Hiller, Wendy 124 Hilton, James 95 Hitchcock, Alfred 2, 3, 6, 44, 99, 113, 153, 157, 198, 205, 207, 211, 212, 218, 227 Holland, Agnieska 123 Holst, Gustav 188 Homage to Catalonia 96 Hopkins, Miriam 29, 32, 33, 68, 124, 139, 140, 141, 199, 200, 203, 204 A House Divided 18–22, 47, 48, 177 Houston, Penelope 157 How Green Was My Valley 92, 194 How to Steal a Million 7, 9, 194, 211–215, 217 Howard, Sidney 34, 36, 39, 42, 196 Hume, Benita 28 Humphries, Reynold 167 The Hunchback of Notre Dame 12 Hunter, Ian McLellan 146 Hurst, Paul 28 Huston, John 6, 18, 22, 52, 66, 68, 92, 100, 120, 144, 146, 153, 166, 181, 222 Huston, Walter 18–21, 34, 39, 41, 48, 178

245 I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang 23 Ibsen, Henrik 196 Imitation of Life 12 In the Heat of the Night 222 Inescourt, Frieda 81 Inside Daisy Clover 216 Irma la Douce 217 Irving, Clifford 214 It Happened One Night 26, 146 It’s Always Fair Weather 218 Ives, Burl 7, 171, 174, 176, 177, 178, 219 Jacobs, Lewis 34 James, Henry 3, 34, 42, 45, 120, 122, 123, 127, 128, 129 Jarre, Maurice 210 Jarvie, I. C. 169 Jenkins, Allen 50 Jewell, Isabel 24 Jewison, Norman 222 Jezebel 4, 5, 7, 9, 14, 35, 57, 67– 77, 68, 78, 128, 148, 172, 219, 220, 222 Johnson, Arch 222 Jones, Jennifer 136, 138, 142 Jones, Marcia Mae 30, 32, 33 Julia 33 Kael, Pauline 73, 79, 81, 122, 219 Kanal 167 Kantor, MacKinlay 104, 105, 110 Karloff, Boris 208 Kaye, Danny 29 Kazan, Elia 2, 138 Kellaway, Cecil 55 Kelly, Gene 218 Kelly, Grace 153 Kennedy, Arthur 159 Kent, Barbara 14 Kern, Eugene 100 Keystone Kops 13 The Killers 158 Kinberg, Jud 207 King, Henry 175 King, Martin Luther 225 King of Kings 181 Kingsley, Sidney 3, 29, 49, 131, 132 The Knack 211 Knight, Arthur 101 Knopf, Edwin 84 Koch, Howard 78 Koenig, Lester 92, 121, 146 Kohler, Fred 25 Kohner, Paul 12 Kohner, Susan 12 Komai, Tatsu 78 Kotsonaros, George 13 Kotto, Yaphet 222 Kruger, Alma 204 Kubik, Gail 92, 160 Kurnitz, Harry 212, 213

246 Kurosawa, Akira 113, 227, 228 Kyne, Peter B. 16, 17 The Ladykillers 154, 157 Laemmle, Carl 10, 165 Laemmle, Carl, Jr. 9, 14, 22, 68 Lang, Charles 213 Langtry, Lillie 66 La Plante, Laura 15 La Roy, Rita 15 Lasky, Jesse 29 The Last Flight 18 Laurie, John 53 La Valley, Albert 38, 42 Lawrence of Arabia 78, 210, 216 Lazy Lightning 13 Lean, David 1, 2, 6, 9, 10, 11, 78, 103, 108, 145, 146, 165, 170, 182, 216, 221, 228 Lederer, Francis 27, 28 Leeds, Andrea 46 Leenhardt, Roger 3, 229 The Left-Handed Gun 97 Leigh, Vivien 53, 54, 139 Leisen, Mitchell 28 Lejeune, C. A. 95 Lennart, Isobel 217 Leone, Sergio 170, 182, 228 Lester, Bruce 79 Lester, Richard 211 The Letter 5, 10, 63, 67, 77–83, 221 The Letter (television version) 74 A Letter to Three Wives 123 Lewis, Sinclair 34, 42 The Liberation of L. B. Jones 5, 122, 127, 194, 221–226 The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean 66 The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter 111 Life with Father 102 Limelight 144 Lindsay, Margaret 4, 73, 76 Linley, Betty 125 The Lion in Winter 216 The Little Foxes 3, 6, 8, 9, 30, 35, 47, 48, 67, 72, 83, 84–91, 127, 130, 194, 222, 225, 84 Litvak, Anatole 95, 124, 216 The Lonely Life 67, 69, 72 Long Day’s Journey into Night 125 Longdon, Terence 184 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 31 Lost Horizon 95 Love, Phyllis 163 Love in the Afternoon 212 The Love Trap 9, 14–16 Loy, Myrna 29, 103, 105, 118 Lubitsch, Ernst 25, 27, 28, 153, 211 Lugosi, Bela 18 Lukas, Paul 9, 38 Lumet, Sidney 125, 136, 216

Index Mackendrick, Alexander 154, 157 MacLaine, Shirley 6, 111, 195, 197, 198, 199, 201, 203, 204 Macready, George 133, 136 Madsen, Axel 15, 52, 62, 114, 139, 162, 229 The Magnificent Ambersons 144 Main, Marjorie 50, 163, 164 Majors, Lee 222 Maloney, James 132 The Maltese Falcon 50 Mamet, David 34, 42, 44, 45 Mamoulian, Rouben 155, 227 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 66 Mandell, Daniel 24, 29, 30, 46, 113 Mander, Miles 55 Mankiewicz, Joseph L. 122, 123 Mann, Anthony 6, 21 Mann, Stanley 27 Mann, Thomas 104 March, Fredric 1, 10, 103, 105, 107, 109, 112, 118, 138, 155, 156 Marin, Jacques 213 Marked Men 16 Marlowe, Kathryn 36 Marnie 218 Marshall, Herbert 6, 9, 26, 27, 77, 80, 81, 85 Martin, Dewey 9, 154, 156 Marton, Andrew 189, 190 Mary Poppins 226 Mason, James 53 Matthau, Carol 54 Maugham, W Somerset 78 Maurice 205 Mayer, Arthur 119 Mayer, Louis B. 94, 98 Mayo, Virginia 104 McArthur, Charles 52 McArthur, Colin 49 McCarthy, Joseph 9, 121, 122, 137, 144, 159, 167, 169, 185, 202 McCrae, Joel 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 46, 49, 51, 99, 201 McDowall, Roddy 93, 194 McGuire, Dorothy 162, 165 McKenna, Siobhan 83 McMahon, Horace 131, 132 McMurray, Fred 110 McVay, Douglas 204, 205 Medford, Kay 218 Melville, Jean-Pierre 8, 103, 195, 196, 206, 228 The Memphis Belle 92, 100–102, 115, 117, 121, 227 Merrill, Bob 217 Middleton, Robert 157, 162, 163 Midnight 28 Miles, Sarah 210 Milestone, Lewis 93, 165 Millar, Stuart 3, 161, 164, 165, 166, 170 Miller, Arthur 137, 196

Mills, John 4, 83 Milne, Tom 3, 197 Mimieux, Yvette 210 Minnelli, Vincente 6, 212 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town 166 Mizoguchi, Kenji 113 Modern Times 111, 140, 218 Mohr, Gerald 134 Molnar, Ferenc 26 Moore, Vin 13 More, Kenneth 207 Morell, Andre 183 Morgan, Frank 26 Moross, Jerome 9, 169, 171, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 213 The Mortal Storm 25, 95 Mrs. Miniver 91, 92, 93–99, 123, 162, 171, 211 Mulligan, Robert 216 Muni, Paul 23 Murphy, George 121 Murray, James 13, 14 The Music Man 90 My Fair Lady 214 Myrtil, Odette 38 Nash, Mary 48 Nash, Ogden 11, 25 National Velvet 31 Navasky, Victor S. 146 Neame, Ronald 211 The Negro Soldier 122 New York, New York 221 Newman, Alfred 9, 29, 45, 60, 62, 197 Newman, Paul 156 Newton, Robert 52 Ney, Richard 96 Nichols, Mike 90, 122 The Night Holds Terror 158 The Night of the Generals 216 Niven, David 29, 34, 37, 54 Nixon, Richard 167 No Way Out 122 Nogueira, Rui 195, 196 North, Alex 9, 197, 199, 200 The North Star 93 Nugent, Frank 31 Oakman, Wheeler 13 Oberon, Merle 29, 30, 31, 33, 46, 52, 53, 54 O’Donnell, Cathy 105, 118, 135, 185, 194 The Offence 136 Oklahoma! 165 Oldstead, Remington 188 Olivier, Laurence 3, 4, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 137, 138, 139, 140, 143, 144, 145, 220 The Omen 8 On Dangerous Ground 133 O’Neill, Eugene 18 The Ore Raiders 13 Orwell, George 96

Index Othello 40 O’Toole, Peter 7, 212, 213, 214 Our Town 179 Ouspenskaya, Maria 42 Owen, Reginald 26 Ozu, Yasujiro 8, 113, 228 Pallette, Eugene 23 The Palm Beach Story 26 Palmer, Christopher 180, 181 Parker, Dorothy 85 Parker, Eleanor 132, 134 Parrish, Robert 208 Patton: Lust for Glory 194, 217 Paule, Lennox 28 Payne, John 36 Peck, Gregory 7, 17, 66, 72, 145, 147, 150, 151, 169, 170, 172, 175, 193, 206, 216, 228 Penn, Arthur 97 Perkins, Anthony 162, 165 The Petrified Forest 105, 155 Picasso, Pablo 209 Pidgeon, Walter 94, 98, 217 The Pink Panther 211 A Place in the Sun 137 Planer, Franz 147, 179 Polanski, Roman 207 Pollack, Howard 130 Polonsky, Abraham 114, 115, 117 The Portrait of a Lady 127 Powell, Dick 26 Power, Tyrone 23 The Power and the Glory 183 Preminger, Otto 133, 205 Previn, André 121 Psycho 207, 211 Puccini, Giacomo 194 Qualen, John 23 Queen Christina 52 Quigly, Isabel 197, 203 Quine, Richard 24 Quo Vadis? 191 Raft, George 50 Raksin, David 9, 143 Random Harvest 95 Rathbone, Basil 124 Rattigan, Terence 196 Rawlings, Margaret 194 Ray, Nicholas 133, 160 Ray, Rene 53 Reagan, Ronald 167 Rear Window 44, 153, 199 Reardon, Craig 179 Rebecca 105 Red Badge of Courage 144 Red Channels 121 Reed, Carol 197 Reid, Carl Benton 85 Reisz, Karel 3, 90, 104, 113, 117, 123 Relph, George 192 Rennie, Michael 83

Repulsion 207 Revere, Anne 31 Rhode, Eric 69, 91, 98, 104, 115 Rich, Robert 146 Richardson, Ralph 123, 124, 125, 127, 128 Richman, Mark 163, 164 Ridin’ for Love 13 The Robe 183 Robinson, Casey 147 Robinson, James 192 Robson, Flora 55 Robson, Mark 132 Rocco, Fernando 87 Rogers, Ginger 137 Roman Holiday 8, 9, 120, 121, 144, 145–153, 194, 206, 210, 212, 213, 216 Romero, Cesar 26 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 94, 105, 122 Rose, William 154 Ross, Herbert 216 Rossellini, Roberto 165 Rossen, Robert 14, 123 Rosson, Richard 46, 47 Roughead, William 31 Rózsa, Miklós 9, 181, 182, 184, 188 Russell, Harold 105, 106, 118 Ruysdael, Basil 140 Ryan, Robert 133 Ryan’s Daughter 9 Sabrina 212 Saint-Saens, Camille 12, 213 Salinger, J. D. 209 Sanders, Clare 97 Sanford, Erskine 111 Sarris, Andrew 2, 9, 25, 27, 64, 79, 80, 103, 181, 207, 208, 211, 221, 222 Scarface 23 The Scarlet Letter 78 Schaffner, Franklin J. 194, 217 Schindler, Colin 94 Schubert, Franz 87 Scofield, Paul 83 Scorsese, Martin 122, 221 Scott, George C. 194, 213, 217 Scott, Martha 155, 184 Scott, Ridley 182 The Search 125 The Secret Life of Walter Mitty 102 Secret People 148 Selwyn, Edgar 29 Selwynne, Clarissa 15 Selznick, David O. 69, 138 Sennett, Mack 13 The Set-Up 14 The Seventh Seal 167 Severn, Christopher 97 The Shakedown 13–14, 22, 71 Shane 169

247 Sharif, Omar v, 7, 78, 215, 216, 219, 221 Shearer, Norma 97 Sherman, Vincent 24 Sherriff, R. C. 95 Sherwood, Robert 3, 29, 105, 106, 110, 116, 122 Shipman, David 21, 22, 25, 74, 98, 114 The Shop Around the Corner 25 Shostakovich, Dimitri 229 Shumlin, Herman 31 Sidney, Sylvia 49, 51, 52 Sim, Alastair 53 Simmons, Jean 17, 72, 73, 148, 169, 175, 176, 193 Sinatra, Frank 216 Siodmak, Robert 158 Sirk, Douglas 12, 160 Smith, Susan 219 The Snake Pit 124 Sondergaard, Gale 80, 82 Song of Myself 228 The Sound of Music 194, 206, 211 Spielberg, Steven 182, 191 Spirit of Culver 23 Stagecoach 65, 66 Stamp 206, 207, 208 Stander, Lionel 28 Stanwyck, Barbara 110 Star! 216 A Star Is Born 215 Stark, Ray 215, 216, 217 Steiner, Max 9, 72, 73, 77, 83 Stephenson, James 63, 78, 79, 80, 81 Sternfeld, Frederic W. 117 Stevens, George 2, 100, 120, 137, 161, 164, 169, 181 Stewart, Donald Ogden 121 Stewart, James 102 Stone, Andrew, and Virginia 158 Stone, Fred 62 The Storm 13 Strauss, Richard 72 Stravinsky, Igor 181 A Streetcar Named Desire 139, 144 Streisand, Barbra 7, 215, 216, 219, 220, 221 Stroheim, Erich von 11, 13, 17 Strong, Michael 131 Struthers, Jan 94 Sturges, John 92, 101 Sturges, Preston 26, 27 Styne, Jule 217 Suddenly 158 Sullavan, Margaret 25, 26, 69, 216 Sullivan’s Travels 26 Summer Madness 147 Summerville, Slim 22 Sutherland, Nan 35 Sweet Charity 216 Swink, Robert 205, 223, 224

248 A Tale of Two Cities 76 Tamiroff, Akim 28 Tannenbaum, Harold 92 Tarkovsky, Andrei 222 Taylor, Elizabeth 31, 137, 148 Taylor, John Russell 2, 35, 195, 228 Tchaikovsky, Peter 9 Tea and Sympathy 165 Teal, Ray 114, 139, 224 Tearle, Godfrey 122 The Tempest 207 Temple, Shirley 33 Term of Trial 208 Thalberg, Irving 11 These Three 5, 8, 29–34, 195, 197, 200, 201, 202, 203, 227 They Shall Have Music 12 The Third Man 197 This Above All 95 This Happy Breed 165 Thomson, David 228 Three Godfathers 16 Thring, Frank 183, 186 Thunderbolt 92, 100–102, 121 Tibbetts, John C. 196 Tiomkin, Dimitri 9, 62, 163, 166 To Catch a Thief 212 To Kill a Mockingbird 226 Todd, Ann 53 Todd, Thelma 24 Toland, Gregg 5, 29, 30, 39, 51, 57, 58, 60, 65, 90, 102, 105, 114, 119 Tom Brown of Culver 22–23 Tookey, Chris 197 Topkapi 211 Tracy, Spencer 48, 137, 139, 156 Trauner, Alexander 213 Travers, Henry 96 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre 155, 175, 178 Trevor, Claire 50 Trevor, Norman 15

Index Trouble in Paradise 211 Trumbo, Dalton 121, 146, 150, 167 Tucker, Forrest 66 Tunberg, Karl 184 Turner, Adrian 1, 124 Two Cheers for Democracy v, 94 Tyler, Parker 25 Tyler, Tom 64 Tynan, Kenneth 162 Ustinov, Peter 148, 208 Vidal, Gore 4, 184, 185 Vidor, King 14, 227 Visconti, Luchino 211 Wajda, Andrzej 167 Walker, Alexander 79 Wallace, Lew 187 Wallach, Eli 213 Walsh, Moira 6 Wanger, Walter 52 Warner, H. B. 22 Warner, Jack 67, 78, 79 Warrick, Ruth 139 Warshow, Robert 103 Washington, Ned 166 Washington Square 3, 122, 126, 127, 227 Waterloo Bridge 95 Wayne, John 7 The Wedding March 13 Welles, Orson 2, 4, 144, 148, 214, 215, 227 Wellman, William 82 Went the Day Well? 94 West, Claudine 95 West, Jessamyn 1, 9, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 170 West, Nathanael 23 The Westerner 9, 60–66, 61 Wharton, Edith 122 What’s New, Pussycat? 211 Where the Sidewalk Ends 133

White Cliffs of Dover 95 Whitman, Walt 228 Whitty, Dame May 96 Widor, Charles-Marie 180 Wilcoxon, Henry 97 Wilder, Billy 2, 5, 9, 50, 87, 103, 107, 109, 110, 120, 122, 133, 144, 148, 150, 153, 171, 181, 212, 217, 222, 228 Will There Really Be a Morning? 48 Williams, Heathcote 149 Williams, John 213 Wills, Chill 224 Willson, Meredith 90 Wilson, Michael 164, 166, 167 Wise, Robert 14, 155, 194 Witness for the Prosecution 212 The Wizard of Oz 121 Wood, Natalie 210 Wood, Robin 8, 46, 48, 155, 193 Wray, Fay 13 Wright, Basil 16 Wright, Teresa 72, 84, 89, 96, 99, 105, 118 Wuthering Heights 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 52–60, 53, 65, 11, 156, 197, 209, 227 Wyler, Catherine v, 25, 53, 86, 93, 107, 148, 227 Wyler, Robert 118, 131, 164, 166, 167, 194 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny 228 Yordan, Philip 131 York, Susannah 210 Yoshimura, Kimisaburo 113 Young, Gig 157 Yung, Sen 82 Zanuck, Darryl 17 Zerbe, Anthony 222, 223 Zimbalist, Sam 183, 184, 190 Zinnemann, Fred 2, 4, 12, 33, 125, 158, 165, 169, 181, 216