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The FIR Vault

WILLIAM WYLER

By Archives • Apr 16th, 2009 • Pages: 1 2 3

With Davis on THE LITTLE FOXES

Goldwyn then had Merle Oberon under contract and Wyler used the possibility of her playing Cathy to induce Goldwyn to buy the MacArthur-Hecht script from Wanger. Hecht suggested Laurence Olivier for the part of Heathcliff, and when Wyler went to London to cast WUTHERING HEIGHTS, he offered Olivier the part. Olivier and Vivien Leigh were then living together – each was waiting for a divorce to be final and Olivier didn’t want to be apart from her. So Wyler offered Miss Leigh the part of Isabella. She refused so peremptorily he remarked that since she was unknown she couldn’t expect to do better for her first part in a Hollywood picture. “She showed me,” Wyler says with a wry smile.

Olivier was equal to the demands of the complex, and all important, role of Heathcliff, but Miss Oberon was only adequate as Cathy (see James Shelley Hamilton’s review in the April ’39 issue of “The National Board of Review Magazine”). Gregg Toland’s black-n-white cinematography is some of the very best the screen has had, and Alfred Newman’s score is one of filmusic’s most evocative. Geraldine Fitzgerald played Isabella, and one of her scene is unforgettably poignant. In any year but ’39 – the year of GONE WITH THE WIND – WUTHERING HEIGHT would have won an Academy Award.

Gregg Toland’s photographic genius also contributed importantly to THE WESTERNER, a picture film societies should revive regularly. Some of the scenes in which Gary Cooper espousing Texas homesteaders of the 1880s, confronts Walter Brennan as the cattleman’s mentor and spokes man, are the best Wyler has ever done. Brennan got an Oscar for his performance and Cooper should have gotten one for his generosity in letting Brennan’s role (that of Judge Bean, “the law west of Pecos” who idolized Lily Langtry) become so major a one. The unusual extent, and depth, of characterization in THE WESTERNER was due not only to Wyler, and to Wyler’s proficiency in the Western genre, but also to the script by Stuart N. Lake (who also did the scripts for WELLS FARGO, MY DARLING CLEMENTINE and WINCHESTER 73).

With Loy & March on THE BEST YEARS...

It’s surprising how many think THE LETTER contains Wyler’s best direction. In fact, a few regard THE LETTER as his best picture. It is certainly an example of how a stage play should be adapted to the screen and how proficient actors can be effectively orchestrated by a knowing director (backed by a sophisticated producer who spares no expense where talent is concerned). THE LETTER’s opening scene, e.g., establishes without a word of dialogue the milieu, the central character, and the problem. It is night and as the camera probes through the tropical heat over a Malay rubber plantation, we hear a shot, and see a man stumble out of the owner’s bungalow. As he attempts to crawl away a woman (Bette Davis) emerges from the bungalow and fires all the bullets remaining in her revolver into his prostrate body. The way Wyler enables us to learn that this killing was not in self-defense, as the woman claims, but one of passion and vengeance, is melodrama at its best. The script was written by Howard Koch, from the Somerset Maugham play. Like everyone else, Wyler disapproves of the ending he was forced to use by the Motion Picture Code Authority (“in those days you could not have a murderer go free”).

Wyler works closely with the writers of the scripts he directs. “I criticize,” he says, “and I leave alone the things that are good. All on the basis of my own likes and dislikes. On the set I follow the storyline of the finished script, but sometimes a scene’s significance isn’t apparent until you see the actors playing it. Reading it is one thing, seeing it played is another. Also, actors sometimes make good suggestions, which require script changes on the set.”

Wyler likes his film version of THE LITTLE FOXES and thinks it is a successful instance of adapting a stage play to the screen. I happen to think Bette Davis’ portrayal of Regina Giddens in this film is her apotheosis.

With Olivia de Havilland on THE HEIRESS

Wyler was nominated for an Academy Award in ’38, ’39, ’40 and ’41 and he says he attended the Award ceremonies in each of those years “carrying a little black satchel to take the Oscar home in, but the year I won an Oscar I wasn’t there because I was in the Air Force.”

He won his first Oscar for MRS. MINIVER (’42), which is an outstanding example of how good a propaganda film can be. In fact, six Oscars resulted from MRS. MINIVER: Best Picture: Best Actress (Greer Garson); Best Supporting Actress (Teresa Wright); Best Direction; Best Screenplay (Arthur Wimperis, George Froeschel, James Hilton and Claudine West); and Best Black-&White Photography (Joseph Ruttenberg). Says Wyler today: “The most satisfaction I get out of a film, aside from its being successful financially and critically, is its contribution to the thinking of people, socially or politically. In this sense every film is a propaganda film. Many people saw MRS. MINIVER and perhaps it changed the minds of a few.”

As soon as he finished MRS. MINIVER Wyler enlisted in the US Air Force (“the Signal Corps turned me down”); became attached to the 91st Bomber Group of the Eighth Air Force, which was stationed a Bassingbourne, England; and set to work on a documentary of the bombing flights over Germany made by our “Flying Fortresses”. The result is one of the good documentaries made during World War II: THE MEMPHIS BELLE. Because of the war’s exigencies Wyler also did some of the writing, producing and editing chores on THE MEMPHIS BELLE. He even did a little of its photography. During the Italian campaign he made a documentary about the bombing flights of the 57th Fighter Group of the Twelfth Air Force (THUNDERBOLT). Wyler says his hearing was damaged by the high-altitude flight he made. He came out of the war Lt. Colonel.

With Audrey Hepburn on ROMAN HOLIDAY

The first picture he directed or his return to civilian life is his favorite Wyler film. It won seven Academy Awards: Best Picture; Best Direction; Best Actor (Fredric March); Best Supporting Actor (Harold Russell); Best Screenplay (Robert E. Sherwood); Best Editing (Daniel Mandell); Best Scoring of a Dramatic Picture (Hugo Friedhofer). And Harold Russell was given an additional, special Award for “bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans through his appearance in THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES.”

“I knew the characters in this film,” Wyler says, “because I had personally lived many of their experiences, and it was no problem to imagine what they’d do in a particular situation because I already knew. I hadn’t, like Russell, lost my hands, but I did lose my hearing in one ear, which is bothersome. But I identified with Fredric March, for I wasn’t a kid anymore, had no problem of getting a job, but did have a problem re-adjusting to civilian life. Some of my best work is in this picture, and I get real gratification from believing it contributed to an understanding of the times we lived in.”

THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES is usually regarded as Wyler’s apogee, and many pro-Wyler-ites believe that, with the exception of THE HEIRESS, all his pictures since THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES have been examples of his directorial virtuosity. Virtuosity of a high order, but virtuosity. His heart wasn’t in them.

Be that as it may, after he finished THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES he joined with George Stevens and Frank Capra in forming a corporation – Liberty Films – to produce films. Those three men certainly knew enough about filmaking to think they could do without the services of a major studio. They soon learned otherwise, and in ’47 they sold Liberty Films to Paramount which bought their corporation in order to place under contract, at one swoop, three outstanding directors.

Wyler’s first picture for Paramount under this contract was THE HEIRESS, which was adapted by Ruth and Augustus Goetz from the stage play they had fashioned from Henry James’ Washington Square. Their screenplay provides, in addition to a rather soaperish story about a well-born wallflower in the NYC of the 1850s, a glimpse into the mores of the American ruling class, and Wyler got out of the Goetz script all the insights the Goetzes had gotten out of James. He cast Ralph Richardson as Dr. Austin Sloper and a better choice could not have been made. Olivia de Havilland, as the daughter Dr. Sloper regarded as “dull,” was better in the early passages, when her ineptitude was being established, than in the later ones. A literate score by Aaron Copland and consisted largely of borrowings from his “Appalachian Spring” and the French chanson, “Plaisir d’Amour.” He got an Academy Award for it. As Hermine Rich Isaacs said in FILMS IN REVIEW: “The music, like everything else in this admirable film, is conceived with taste and executed with style.”

Wyler then did another adaptation of a stage play: DETECTIVE STORY. He says today his enjoyment in directing it came from the challenge of how a one-set stage play can be given movement on the screen. DETECTIVE STORY is merely a programmer, but Wyler’s ingenuity in making it move caused him to be nominated for an Academy Award (his eighth nomination).

With Dorothy McGuire & Gary Cooper on FRIENDLY PERSUASION

Wyler’s next film was an adaptation by the Goetzes of Theodor Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. Their adaptation was not faithful to Dreiser’s intention. Carrie was made to seer more sinned against than sinning and the social forces which, in the novel, account for her opportunism were invisible in the film. Nevertheless, CARRIE is an under-rated motion picture. Wyler put into it a not in considerable amount of the ambience of Chicago in the so-called Gilded Age. Laurence Olivier’s performance as Hurstwood surprised many who had assumed he would be insensitive to the nuances of so America a character as Hurstwood. Jennifer Jones’ performance in the title role was akin more to the Goetzes’ alteration of Dreiser’s character than to Dreiser’s own version. The costuming and set direction in CARRIE are still worth seeing.

I have said that after THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES Wyler’s film were largely exercises in virtuosity and I should have added that man directors would have given their eye teeth to have been able to direct such pictures. Especially is ROMAN HOLIDAY such a film. It is a cinematic success concocted out of Molnar fluff. Wyler gave it substance by wandering around Rome and finding interesting location shots, and by casting Audrey Hepburn as the sleeping princess (it was her screen debut). “Since the character was a European princess,” Wyler says, “I didn’t think she should speak like an American, so I set out to find an English actress. I interviewed quite a few in London and chose Audrey Hepburn not so much for her appearance as for her class. She’s a real aristocrat in every way.” ROMAN HOLIDAY was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Direction. Miss Hepburn won the Best Actress one.

THE DESPERATE HOURS, which followed, is Wyler’s least successful cinemation of a stage play. He says it would have been better had it contained more violence. Yes, every once in a while Wyler succumbs to the blandishments of current shibboleths.

And FRIENDLY PERSUASION is not as good as it should have been. Based on some Jessamyn West stories about Quakers in Indiana at the time of the Civil War, it is redolent with Americana, and contains winning performances by Gary Cooper and Dorothy McGuire as the idealized Quaker husband and wife. But there are flaws. One of the most inexplicable was the casting of Anthony Perkins in a film about nineteenth century agrarian Quakerism. There are also inspired touches, such as Mary Carr, at a Quaker meeting, breaking “the silence” by reading from the Book of Proverbs. “I’ve always been a sort of pacifist,” Wyler says, “but not an all-out one of the Quaker variety. Nevertheless, the Quakers’ religion is the only one that makes sense. In FRIENDLY PERSUASION we deal with the beliefs of the Quakers as they were tested in a time of turmoil.”

With Heston & Boyd on BEN-HUR

Wyler and Gregory Peck personally produced Wyler’s next film: THE BIG COUNTRY. It is a 166-minute scenically beautiful Western with an inconsistent, unbelievable script. Jessamyn West and Wyler’s brother (Robert) are credited with the adaptation of the Donald Henderson novel from which James R. Webb, Syd Bartlett and Robert Wyler wrote the screenplay. Wyler says the film dealt with the problem of “turning the other cheek” in a milieu which didn’t operate on that principle. But audiences didn’t get this message, and their failure to do so was not their fault (it was the fault of the scriptwriters).

Wyler admits that he did BEN-HUR (’59) to prove he could do it, but he adds: “It’s the best picture of its genre that’s ever been made and I’m glad I did it.” Not a few agree with him, including myself (it won 11 Academy Awards). It may be true, as some critics have said, that an outstanding piece of propaganda for Christianity was, in this version of BEN-HUR, transformed into propaganda for Judaism, but that’s not a bad thing in these days of OneWorldism and other kinds of ecumenism. The spectacle in BEN-HUR is conceived and executed as ably as any of the spectacle in any of Cecil B. DeMille’s films, and the personal dramas in Wyler’s BEN-HUR are replete with directorial finesse and emotional poignancy. Miklos Rozsa’s score contains some of the best filmusic ever composed. Above all: there are important spiritual themes and conflicts in this version of BEN-HUR, including one with great relevance for today, especially the confrontation between the pagan belief that force is the only arbiter, and the Judeo-Christian belief in transcendental reason. I personally think BEN-HUR is the equal of any Wyler film, and that it should be reevaluated by those who dismiss it as mere spectacle, or as an example of Wyler’s directorial virtuosity.

Wyler went from the sublimity of BEN-HUR to the ignobility of THE CHILDREN’S HOUR, a re-make of his THESE THREE, with the lesbianism explicit, and deviously justified. Miss Hellman again worked on the script, but it makes little sense, even from the Hellman viewpoint. Audrey Hepburn plays the teacher for whom a colleague (Shirley MacLane) has a perverted yen. Perverted sex was then (’62) just becoming the staple of conscienceless Hollywood producers, and Wyler should not have lent himself to so confused and dishonest a picture.

His choice for his next film, THE COLLECTOR, was a little better, but not by much. The title character in THE COLLECTOR is an obscure bank clerk with an inferiority complex who has a butterfly collection, and who, when he wins the equivalent of $200,000 in a football pool, “collects” an art student he’s been admiring from distance, immures her in a cellar of an isolated cottage, buries her after she contracts pneumonia and dies, and, in the film’s concluding shot, sets off to “collect” another girl. Terence Stamp has the title role and Wyler did not get a performance out of him, largely, I think, because the part is implausibly written. Wyler says he did THE COLLECTOR because “it’s a two-character film and two-character films are notoriously hard to bring off.” His direction of THE COLLECTOR was nominated for an Academy Award.

He then did a comedy with Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole: HOW TO STEAL A MILLION. It’s a spoof of the films that detail the planning of a crime, and it doesn’t come off.

With Barbara Streisand on FUNNY GIRL

Whereupon Wyler directed his first filmusical: FUNNY GIRL, in which Barbra Streisand portrays Fannie Brice. Most critics thought Miss Streisand better in the film than in the stage version of FUNNY GIRL, and that her improvement was due to Wyler (see FIR, Oct. ’68). Wyler modestly evades this and makes noises about Miss Streisand’s “professionalism.”

Wyler’s last film to date, THE LIBERATION OF L. B. JONES, is a major disappointment. It should have been a meaningful exposition of some of the aspects of the current racial problems in the US. Instead, it is an unbelievable amalgam of the current racial stereotypes and of old-hat melodrama.

Nevertheless, the Wyler of THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES has not forsaken the faith. He still believes a story should have a beginning, middle and end; that if an actor gives a bad performance it is the director’s fault; and that camera tricks are bad for a picture if, instead of helping a film to be more effective, they merely call attention to the director’s “cleverness.” And he still believes the art of the motion picture is in its infancy and that new technics and techniques are just waiting to be discovered.

For example, his loss of hearing in one ear obliged him to wear a hearing aid. One day it occurred to him to hook his aid to the microphone on the set so he could hear what the actors’ voices would be like on the sound track.

“I wish it had occurred to me long before,” says Wyler. “I think all directors should do it.”

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