William Wyler (24 page)

Pres resists Buck's attempts to challenge him, concluding their argument by saying, “I think you know I'm no abolitionist. I believe the tide has turned against us. But I'll swim against the tide just as far as you will, Cantrell…. Naturally, we claim the right to the customs we were born to, even some of us who question the value of those customs.” It doesn't take long for Buck to come around to Pres's point of view. Shortly after being challenged to a duel by Pres's brother Ted (who has been provoked by Julie), Buck echoes the suggestion that the customs that impel him to fight may be outdated. Even Julie, while trying to talk Buck out of the duel, calls his code “stupid”—a thing for “fools.” Wyler's principals all understand or come to understand that they are caught in history's vise.

The film winds down quickly after the altercation at dinner. Summoned to the city to help with the yellow fever epidemic, which is now taking a heavy toll, Pres will soon become a victim himself. After Buck's death in the duel, Julie is chastened to learn that Buck knew what she had done and said so before he died. General Bogardus admonishes Julie and refuses to continue as her guardian, while Aunt Belle calls her “a Jezebel.” Determined to change, Julie vows to return to Pres's side in the now quarantined city. Accompanied by her servant Gros Bat (Eddie Anderson), she travels in a rowboat through misty swamps, under cover of night, to reach New Orleans.

The film's climax pits Julie against Amy, who has also arrived to attend to her husband. As men come to evacuate Pres to Lazarette Island, where the sick are quarantined, Julie begs Amy for a chance to prove herself worthy of Pres and make herself “clean again” by accompanying him to the island, where they both will surely die. Amy at first refuses, insisting that she must go with her husband, but Julie convincingly pleads her case, declaring that she is stronger and better suited for the arduous task ahead. Humbled, Julie finally comes to terms with her own faults and is made stronger by the chance to redeem herself, to throw off the stigma of being a “Jezebel” and prove her love for Pres.

Wyler films this scene by moving Davis among various planes of action. Julie first confronts Amy at the foot of the stairs, but much of their conversation takes place on the staircase itself, with Amy above Julie as the latter debases herself. Wyler's shots of Davis are anything but starlike; her hair is pinned back, and she is plain looking. The exchange between the two women is conveyed primarily in two shots, but when Amy ultimately yields, Wyler again focuses his camera on Julie, who now appears even plainer yet beatific, even heroic. It is not a glamorous close-up, but the intense expression on her face makes it one of the most moving shots of the film.

The film closes with Julie riding alongside Pres on a wagon that is carting the sick to their certain death on Lazarette Island. In stark contrast to the stylish carriage that opened the film, moving through the vibrant streets of the crowded marketplace, this rough wagon rumbles down a dark street lit with flames, and a final profile shot focuses on Julie, whose look, in Affron's words, “matches the blaze of the bonfire.”
²⁹

Wuthering Heights
(1939),
The Westerner
(1940),
The Letter
(1940)

Wyler's next important film about America was
The Westerner
, which was completed in 1939 but, due to a variety of postproduction problems, not released until September 1940. Before taking on that project, however, he made another film for Goldwyn—
Wuthering Heights
—that turned out to be one of his most honored and well-known works. Indeed, the New York Film Critics named it the best film of 1939 over
Gone with the Wind
, and it received eight Oscar nominations, including one for Wyler's direction. Stylistically and thematically,
Wuthering Heights
is an important film, as it reflects Wyler's deepening exploration of expressionist filmmaking techniques and represents his fullest treatment of the theme of idealized love. The portrayal of the character Catherine Earnshaw is dramatically related to that of
Jezebel's
Julie Marsden, and it anticipates Wyler's treatment of Catherine Sloper in
The Heiress
(1949).

Goldwyn and Wyler's route to
Wuthering Heights
was a circuitous one. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur had decided to adapt Emily Brontë's classic novel on speculation in 1936. In refashioning the novel's complex plot for the screen, they eliminated its second half to focus on the romance between Cathy, the daughter of Mr. Earnshaw, and Heathcliff, an orphan that Earnshaw had brought home from Liverpool. Eliminating many of the secondary characters and telescoping the time frame of the book, the screenwriters concentrated exclusively on the twisted, passionate love of the two principals. The script made the studio rounds before independent producer Walter Wanger bought it for two of his stars, Sylvia Sidney and Charles Boyer. But before making that picture, Wanger wanted the pair to appear in
Algiers
, with Sidney supporting newcomer Hedy Lamarr. Already studying a Yorkshire accent for her role in
Wuthering Heights
, Sidney refused, which made Wanger so angry that he decided not to reward her with the part of Cathy. However, his second choice for the role, Katharine Hepburn, was considered box-office poison at the time, so he lost interest in the project.

Hecht and MacArthur then offered the script to Goldwyn, but the producer had his doubts. The flashback structure of the screenplay confused him, and he thought the lovers were too unattractive—the heroine irresponsible, the hero too filled with hate—to appeal to audiences. Goldwyn sent the script to Wyler for his opinion. Wyler loved it and recommended that Goldwyn buy it, but to ensure that he did so, Wyler showed the script to Bette Davis, who had just won the Oscar for
Jezebel
and was anxious to work with Wyler again. Davis then showed the script to Jack Warner and asked him to buy it for her. When Goldwyn heard about this possibility, he immediately purchased the script. However, knowing that Warner would not loan him his biggest star, he asked Wyler if he thought Merle Oberon could play the part. Wyler said she could, and the deal was set.

Wuthering Heights
has been examined by critics primarily as an example of a film adaptation of a classic novel,
¹
but it can be regarded, alternatively, as another of the director's meditations on how the forces of society conspire to destroy the individual. One can fight back, as do Karen, Martha, and Joe in
These Three;
Sam Dodsworth; Drina and, ultimately, Dave in
Dead End;
and Julie Marsden. Or one can give in, as do Mrs. Tilford, Fran Dodsworth, and Buck Cantrell. This film's Catherine Earnshaw, unlike her fictional counterpart (who marries Linton in order to help Heathcliff), suppresses her individualistic emotional attachment to the orphan and yields to the more comfortable and orderly ways of genteel society. Belatedly, she realizes her mistake, but she is ruined anyway. In fact, she wills her own destruction. What excited Wyler about the script for
Wuthering Heights
was the opportunity to explore his themes of idealized love and the individual's struggle with society in a bold new way. This was why he urged Goldwyn to buy it. When Michael Anderegg writes that the film is more an expression “of Goldwyn's showmanship” than of “the director's developing dramatic and stylistic interests,”
²
he fails to recognize the political and social dimensions of Wyler's artistic vision.

Stylistically,
Wuthering Heights
is quite different from Wyler's other films made inside or outside the Goldwyn studios during the 1930s. Less emphasis is placed on realism, more on the symbolic and pictorial qualities of the image.
Wuthering Heights
actually works best as an imaginative rendition of an ideal, for within its insular perspective, the outside world—the larger society that Catherine is drawn to and then abruptly rejects—finally ceases to exist. A handful of supporting players have tangential roles, but all the film's energy is concentrated in its obsessive focus on the two lovers' tempestuous and destructive passions.

This is also Wyler's most self-conscious film, making the viewer very much aware of the camera and the artifice of the cinema. Wyler always worked closely with cinematographer Gregg Toland in planning the visual design of a project. Of this film, Douglas Slocombe writes, “Toland recognized the essential romanticism of the Brontë novel and decided to go all out for romantic pictorial effect, with heavy diffusion, soft candle-light, long warm shadows and chilly swirling mists.”
³
Anticipating
Citizen Kane
in the use of low ceilings to create confined spatial effects, Toland and Wyler also use candlelight to create atmospheric, expressionist compositions, and Wyler has his camera move and probe more than ever before. In a sense, the camera announces itself so often that it becomes another presence in the film.

Richard Griffith, in his monograph on Goldwyn, offers the most insightful comment on the symbolic artistry of
Wuthering Heights:

The setting of the film was not the moors of Yorkshire but a wilderness of the imagination. To have reproduced on the screen any large expanse of landscape would have been to chain the story and its characters to the actual. Instead, Toland and Wyler devised a close-in camerawork which, in every shot, seemed to show only a small part of the whole scene, in which roads, crags, housetops, and human figures were revealed in outlines against dense grays and blacks. Thus was created a chiaroscuro country of the mind in which the passionate Brontë figures can come credibly alive.
⁴

The film opens in a snowstorm that looks fake, as Wyler takes no pains to hide the artifice. The man traipsing through the storm (Lockwood, played by Miles Mander) moves like a stage actor, and the camera adopts his point of view as he happens upon a house that is backlit to make it appear haunted. (Both Anderegg and Harrington point out that the opening has the feel of a horror film.
⁵
) This contrived effect is reinforced by a written prologue that describes the house as “bleak and desolate” and warns that only a lost stranger would “have dared to knock on the door.” When Lockwood enters this forbidding place, he is attacked by dogs, but they are soon called off, leaving him to take in the house, which is in disrepair. From Lockwood's point of view, the camera then locates a series of strange faces—the two servants, Joseph and Ellen Dean (Leo G. Carroll and Flora Robson), to the right; Heathcliff (Laurence Olivier), standing by the fire in the center; and his wife, whose face peers from around a chair to his left. Heathcliff's face is in shadow, while Lockwood's is brightly lit. Since the camera has adopted Lockwood's point of view—and thus conditioned ours—we fear for him. This dramatically gothic opening sequence sets the tone for what follows.

Lockwood is granted permission to spend the night at the house, and Joseph shows him to a bedroom, the bridal chamber, which has not been used in years. Again, the room appears stark, filthy, and depressing, as both the low ceiling and the light from Joseph's candle increase its haunted effect. Once Lockwood falls asleep, Wyler cuts to a banging shutter, and the camera seems to shift its point of view to Cathy's spirit as her theme music is heard and the camera dollies from the window around to Lockwood lying on the bed, framed by the bedpost. It settles on him until he awakes and goes toward the window, where he stares out. Wyler cuts to a close-up of his face in the windowpane as he hears Cathy's voice calling out, “Let me in! Let me in! I'm lost on the moor.” Wyler makes sure that the audience shares Lockwood's experience: we hear what he hears, and his vision is not presented as a hallucination. Heathcliff accepts Lockwood's story as well, rushing out into the storm to find Cathy.

Lockwood is understandably curious about this midnight intrigue, so Ellen Dean, with her face backlit by the firelight, begins to tell the story in flashback. The camera pulls away from her as the story moves into the past. With this narrative turn comes a change in lighting: the dark, forbidding house is now bathed in light both inside and out. I many of the following flashback sequences, Wyler communicates effectively with the camera, while the dialogue, which is often clunky and stilted, feels obtrusive.

The most noteworthy childhood images of Cathy and Heathcliff are the outdoor scenes when they escape to Pennistone Crag, which they imagine is a castle where they are king and queen. In contrast to the almost exclusively indoor settings of Wyler's other Goldwyn films, these scenes have a vitality and freedom that is exhilarating, such as when the two children are shown racing their horses through the moors toward their “castle” in long shots. The camera participates in these moments by emphasizing the liberating spaciousness of nature and its opposition to the constraints of the social world, later exemplified by Heathcliff's demotion to the status of a stable boy and by the genteel lifestyle of the Earnshaws' neighbors the Lintons.

In this regard, Wyler uses two scenes at Pennistone Crag as contrasts to incidents that follow. In the first scene, Heathcliff and Cathy are shown as children, anointing the spot as the site of their kingdom, divorced from the rest of the world. This idyllic moment is followed by the death of Mr. Earnshaw, one of Wyler's most striking compositions. Again, a single flaming candle dominates the center as the children, with their backs to the camera, are framed by the entrance to another part of the room; the low ceiling and the door frame seem to squeeze them into a tight space—a direct contrast to the expansive landscape of the previous scene. The lighting is mostly dark as they face the staircase where Dr. Kenneth (Donald Crisp) descends to inform them of their father's death.

The next pairing shows them as older: Heathcliff, who is now a stable boy, sees Cathy running toward the crag through a window, which will serve as a connecting leitmotif for the sequence. He joins her at their “castle,” but when they hear the sounds of the Lintons' party, Cathy insists that they go and look in on it because she wants “dancing and singing in a pretty world.” This marks the end of their idyll, announced visually by the first window view, indicating that Cathy will be torn between her desire for society and the need to stay true to her essential self. In the evening darkness, they jump over a wall and make their way to the Lintons' house to peer inside at a brightly lit room—a vision framed by the window. Cathy and Heathcliff, in contrast, are lit by low-key lights, suggesting their gloomier life at Wuthering Heights. The Lintons' guests are elegantly dressed and dancing, while the plainly dressed couple stands in shadow outside. As they stare at the bright spectacle, the camera pans with their gaze, showing that Cathy, at least, is dazzled by what she sees. When the dogs alert the guests to the intruders and then attack them, Wyler contrasts the formal attire of the Lintons and their guests, which seems oddly extravagant outdoors, with the more natural appearance of Cathy and Heathcliff. Once they enter the house, however, to attend to Cathy's wounded ankle, it is the young couple who appears out of place in the glare of the lighted room.

When Cathy returns to Wuthering Heights after an extended recuperation at the Linton home, she quarrels with Edgar Linton (David Niven), who is now in love with her, over his unkind and demeaning remarks about Heathcliff. She runs upstairs, sees herself in the mirror dressed up like a Linton, and proceeds to rip off her dress. This willful reaction against the elegant costume in her framed reflection offers a variation on the scene in
Jezebel
when Julie, mirrored from behind, is trying on ball dresses at the dressmaker's and rejects the traditional white gown in favor of the red one that will destroy her relationship with Pres. Here, realizing that an engagement to Edgar will ruin her, Cathy sheds her finery and runs to meet Heathcliff at their “castle.” This vacillation between orderly respectability and her untamed love for Heathcliff will continue for the rest of the film.

These contrary impulses explode in the scene where Cathy tells Ellen that Edgar has proposed to her. When she talks about Edgar's virtues, she is seated, but when Ellen asks her about Heathcliff, she becomes agitated and moves about, commanding the camera's attention. After she accuses Heathcliff of having “sunk so low,” Wyler cuts to the kitchen, where Heathcliff had been hiding, and a flash of lightning illuminates the spot where he once stood, making it his surrogate. Then, as Cathy realizes that she “is” Heathcliff, the storm erupts again, and the lightning illuminates her. This melodramatic mise-en-scène is excessive but in keeping with the rest of the film.

Cathy finally does marry Edgar, and as their home life is introduced by Ellen's narration, Wyler repeats his camera movements and framing from the earlier scene when Cathy and Heathcliff peered into the Lintons' home for the first time. Again, it is dark, and Wyler's camera moves through a lighted window, which at first frames Cathy doing needlepoint. (Her activity anticipates that of another Cathy—Catherine Sloper—whose needlepoint is also a substitute for sublimated passions.) She is sewing an angel, a representative of the heavenly world in which she does not belong (as she told Ellen earlier). Heathcliff enters in a long shot, striding across the length of the room. Now returned from America, he is a gentleman and has bought Wuthering Heights. The scene concludes as it began, with Wyler's camera reversing direction to exit through the window as a storm rages in the dark.