William Wyler (2 page)

Stylistically, Wyler's breakthrough film is the undervalued
Dead End
(1937), for which he again teamed up with Toland. Even though the film's action is limited to one set, Wyler manages to generate a great deal of movement through editing, but he also sets up an interaction between foreground and background that gives the illusion of various planes of action taking place simultaneously. With Toland's help, he is able to deepen the space of the set visually, thus breaking the confines of its theatrical origin. Wyler introduces this effect early on, as Baby Face Martin, a notorious gangster who has returned to his old neighborhood, talks with Dave, a childhood friend. Wyler foregrounds the two men, who are now antagonists, while also depicting life on the streets behind them—in the deep background of the frame, the viewer can even see a woman beating a rug on her fire escape. The camera creates a similar effect later when Wyler foregrounds the Dead End Kids by the dock, where they are framed by wood scaffolding, while visible in the distance is a new high-rise apartment building with a doorman and a wealthy-looking resident sitting on a bench. The layered composition, which brings the two classes together in the frame while separating them in space, offers the impression of a vibrant urban landscape.

In his study of the classic Hollywood film, David Bordwell highlights the scene in which Baby Face and his partner plot to kidnap the son of a wealthy tenant in the nearby high-rise. As the two gangsters sit talking in a restaurant near the window, Wyler shows a mother wheeling a baby carriage outside, framed by the window but somewhat out of focus. Bordwell notes that even though she is not the subject of the conversation, “the fact that she occupies frame center…gives her symbolic significance.”
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Later, when the kidnapping plan becomes problematic because of Baby Face's attempt to kill Dave, Wyler shows the two gangsters foregrounded by the pier but expressionistically barred by its shadows; once again, a woman wheels a baby carriage in the background—this time in focus.

Several interior scenes in
Wuthering Heights
(1939) display Wyler's mastery of composing in depth. As Heathcliff, returned from his travels, arrives to confront Cathy and her new husband in their elegant home, Wyler films his progress from the front door into the living area, where the Lintons are seated. He repeats this movement through space when Heathcliff leaves, emphasizing the stylish living space of the room while also highlighting the “space” that now separates Heathcliff from Cathy. Wyler's camera work manages to seem extravagant and controlled at the same time. When Heathcliff later attends a dance at the Lintons' home, Wyler begins the sequence by double-framing the initial view of the dance, which is seen through the doorway and then reflected in a mirror, thus constricting the space and suggesting that Cathy's choice of money and social status has compromised her. As he did in
Jezebel
the year before, Wyler utilizes the room's ornate columns to confine the guests, even as they seem to glide through space; he also cuts to a shot from behind the orchestra, taking in the whole room, the elaborate architecture, and the elegantly dressed partygoers.

A master at exploring repressed emotions, Wyler loved to employ the settings of spacious older homes, where he could exploit the linear effects of their staircases, columns, arches, and doorways to frame his shots. These formal houses, with their visually spacious but dramatically confined interiors, were perfect stages for Wyler to visualize human confrontation. They are used to impressive effect in
These Three, Jezebel, Wuthering Heights, The Little Foxes, The Heiress, Carrie, The Big Country, Ben-Hur
, and
The Collector
. Of all the structural features of these houses, Wyler was most fond of staircases, using them as loci for the emotional struggles that dominate his narratives. Although they rarely lead anywhere in particular, staircases often figure in his compositions as vertical planes on which characters can be arranged in commanding or authoritative positions—or in subordinate ones, with one character subjected to another's will.

In
The Little Foxes
, Horace waits for his wife at the top of the stairs. When she arrives, Wyler's camera seems to place Horace in a position of authority as he chastises Regina about her underhanded business dealings. But Regina climbs the stairs during the scene and confronts her husband at the top, seizing the power and demeaning him in the process. Later, when Horace is upstairs dying, Regina's brothers gather at the foot of the stairs to await news of his condition. Regina descends the staircase and speaks to them from one of the intermediate steps, demonstrating her power over them in the struggle for control of the family business. After Horace's death, Regina attempts to blackmail her brothers with her knowledge of their theft of her husband's bonds. During this conversation, Wyler shows Regina's daughter Alexandra, in deep focus, slowly descending the stairs as her mother did earlier. She overhears what Regina is saying, and the venality of her family becomes clear to her. At the end of the film, when Alexandra breaks with her mother, Regina's position on the stairs seems diminished as Wyler magnifies her daughter's stinging rejection. Once Alexandra has gone, Regina mounts the stairs alone, and ironically, her ascent is now more that of a victim than a victor.

Wyler echoes this less than triumphant retreat upstairs in
The Heiress.
In the opening sequence, Catherine Sloper is seen descending the staircase, where she stops to greet the maid who is carrying the party dress Catherine will later be wearing when she meets Morris Townsend. Wyler catches her hopeful reflection as she pauses in front of a mirror. But in the film's final movement, after Catherine has exacted her revenge on Morris, she is seen climbing the stairs with a hardened expression—satisfied by her actions, but now doomed in Wyler's framing to life as a prisoner in her own house.

While Bazin's judgment that Wyler's deep focus “aims at perfect neutrality” is not accurate—in fact, it seems clear that the director deliberately organizes his frames to evoke specific responses—both Wyler's style and his attention to detail do support Bazin's assertion that Wyler is a realist. Among the numerous examples of his dedication to verisimilitude, a few stand out: the bill for the dresses and gowns worn in
Jezebel
came to $30,000, the furniture and props for the dinner scene were all period antiques, and the bar was a copy of the famous St. Louis Bar in New Orleans; for
The Little Foxes
, Wyler commissioned a research book with sections on cotton, agriculture, popular books of the time (1902), music, hotel prices, historical background, and so on; the arena for the chariot race in
Ben-Hur
covered more than eighteen acres, with 1,500-foot straightaways alongside a central
spina
, flanked by four statues standing 30 feet high; and for
The Heiress
, costume designer Edith Head went to a New York fashion institute to study women's fashion of the nineteenth century to ensure that every detail would be perfect. For
The Best Years of Our Lives
, as Wyler reported in a magazine piece: “We sent Myrna Loy and Teresa Wright, and young Cathy O'Donnell out to stores in company with our costume designer, Irene Sharaff, to buy the kind of clothes they would buy and wear in the lives they live on the screen. Not only that, but we asked them to wear them for a few weeks so that the clothes wouldn't look too new.” In the same essay, he questions why rooms in Hollywood films “always seem about three times as big as they should be.” He goes on: “To me a man should seem at home in his home. He should move with ease in a background which he is familiar. He should know where chairs are without looking for them…. This union of oneness with man and his background are seldom found on the screen. A home isn't a home unless people act at home. Certainly it isn't a home if it seems like a stage.”
⁸

Realism in film, however, goes only so far, and Wyler was too much of a showman not to understand that his plots needed heavy doses of melodrama if he was to entertain, move, and even instruct his audiences. He preferred properties that had been tested and proved successful in other forms, in part because they guaranteed a built-in audience, and in part because they delivered heavy doses of melodrama. All his films for Goldwyn, except
The Westerner
, were based on successful or famous literary properties. Of his three prewar loan-out films,
Jezebel
and
The Letter
were based on plays, while
Mrs. Miniver
grew out of a best-selling book. Those three works are primarily melodramatic, and
The Letter
, like
Wuthering Heights
, veers closer to expressionism than realism.

In this regard, it is important to note that Wyler was vitally interested in the mechanics and structure of storytelling; even though he never received screenplay credit on his films, he invariably made important contributions to the scripts. And, believing that writing and directing were interconnected, he tried to ensure that writers were always on the set. For his first sound film,
Hell's Heroes
, he conceived an ending so brutal that the producer insisted it be changed. On his next project,
A House Divided
(originally conceived as a silent film), he added almost a hundred scenes to the writer's revised script. He worked intimately with Lillian Hellman on the scripts she wrote for him (
These Three, Dead End
, and
The Little Foxes
), and he cowrote the minister's closing sermon for
Mrs. Miniver
, which was reprinted in numerous magazines.

One of the many projects Wyler worked on but was forced to abandon was
How Green Was My Valley
. It was eventually made into an Oscar-winning film by John Ford, but screenwriter Philip Dunne credits Wyler with coming up with the narrative device (limiting the story to Huw's childhood) that transformed the script. Also, after screenwriter Robert Sherwood decided to leave the closing scene of
The Best Years of Our Lives
to the director's imagination, it was Wyler who invented the aircraft graveyard scene that became one of the film's most affecting moments. Correspondence between Wyler and Ruth and Augustus Goetz shows that the director made important suggestions with regard to the script of
Carrie.
Wyler also hired Jessamyn West to adapt her story collection,
The Friendly Persuasion
, for the screen and then installed his brother Robert to help her; he still managed to make some important changes of his own to their script. He did the same on
The Collector
.

Intimately connected to Wyler's preoccupation with realism and story construction was his commitment to bringing out the very best in his actors—sometimes to the point of alienating them completely. His penchant for retakes made him the scourge of some actors, who ridiculed him as “ninety-take Wyler” or “forty-take Wyler” or “once more Wyler.” His insistence on eliciting the best performance sometimes meant that he had an actor repeat the same gesture or hand motion until he felt it effectively revealed the character. For the famous scene in
Jezebel
when Julie Marsden arrives late to her own engagement party, Wyler instructed Bette Davis to hike up the train of her riding dress with her riding crop and hook it over her shoulder; he then exasperated Davis by making her go through the motion thirty-three times. As Davis commented years later, “No detail, however minor, escaped him.” Although she claimed that “Wyler could make your life hell,” she recognized that she had done her best work with him. And when she won her second Oscar for
Jezebel
, Davis acknowledged, “He made my performance…. it was all Willy.”
⁹

In an antiauteurist study entitled
The Genius of the System
, Thomas Schatz argues that the structure of the studio system made it impossible to isolate any individual as the singular creative force behind a film. Nevertheless, in his section on
Jezebel
, he singles out Wyler's direction for “bringing Julie Marston [
sic
] to life, shaping the viewer's conception of both character and story.” He also points out that Wyler forced both Warner and Hal Wallis to recognize “how important Wyler's skills as a director were to the picture and Davis's performance.” Schatz elaborates: “Through the calculated use of point-of-view shots, reaction shots, glance object cutting, and shot/reverse shot exchanges, Wyler orchestrated the viewer's identification with and sympathy for Julie, which were so essential if the story was to ‘play.'”
¹⁰

Wyler once remarked, “I want actors who can act. I can only direct actors—I can't teach them how to act.” He recognized that “the director's most important function centers on the performance of the actors,” and he considered getting the perfect shot secondary to capturing the best performance.
¹¹
His obsession with detail—the perfect gesture, the subtle exchange—added depth, subtlety, and complexity to his already charged compositions. No director in history has guided actors to more Academy Award nominations (thirty-five) or more Academy Award–winning performances (thirteen). If Wyler himself could not always articulate what he wanted from an actor, Charles Laughton's definition of great acting would surely pass his test: “Great acting is like painting. In the great masters of fine art one can see and recognize the small gesture of a finger, the turn of a head, the vitriolic stare, the glazed eye, the pompous mouth, the back bending under a fearful load. In every swerve and stroke of a painter's brush, there is an abundance of life…. Not imitation—that is merely caricature—and any fool can be a mimic! But creation is a secret. The better—the truer—the creation, the more it will resemble a great painter's immortal work.”
¹²

Wyler was indeed committed to realism in décor, in performance, and in his preference for deep-focus shots. But David Thomson's insistence that he was merely “a reliable master of big projects,” one who “never felt the need to ponder [his scripts] too deeply,”
¹³
is surely as overstated as Sarris's dismissal or Bazin's enthusiasm. Wyler's films, despite their diverse subject matter and multiple genres, display a remarkable thematic consistency. Much of his work mounts a quarrel with and an investigation of his adopted country—a personal inquiry that is reflected in the projects he chose to produce and direct and in the writers he worked with, many of whom were important literary figures of the day: Lillian Hellman, Sidney Kingsley, Sidney Howard, Elmer Rice, Robert Sherwood, Jessamyn West, Gore Vidal, Christopher Fry, and Jesse Hill Ford.