William Wyler (3 page)

Wyler himself authored several published essays in which he articulated the responsibilities of the director-artist. In “Escape to Reality” he wrote: “I wondered why so few films and so few plays honestly reflect the conflicts of our times. Every age, every generation, every decade, every year, has some battle of mind, of emotion—some social cause that favors the time. Why does the screen seldom find these conflicts?”
¹⁴
Three years later, when accepting the One World Award for Motion Pictures, he defined what he meant by
morality
: “I mean the morality of civilized men, which is the morality of humanism, and the acceptance of the social morality it imposes. The dignity of men everywhere should be our great epic theme—the struggle of men to build their societies and to create the wonders of art, of ethics and of science.”
¹⁵

What these remarks indicate—and what is rarely discussed in connection with Wyler—is that his films clearly reflect a strong social and political vision. Sarris's judgment that Wyler's career “is inflating without expanding” is completely untrue.
¹⁶
From the early 1930s, Wyler was either planning or directing films that tackled issues such as capitalism, class structure, war and pacifism, and repressive politics, notably the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). His choice of projects, though superficially diverse, reflects his abiding interest in important social issues and his quarrels with America.

Arguing Wyler's status as an auteur is largely irrelevant at this point in the evolution of film history, however. Any examination of production files from the studio era makes it plain that there was a varied division of labor and that every film was the product of many individual contributions. Scripts went through countless revisions and included scenes and dialogue by writers who were not acknowledged in the final credits. There were also some intense struggles between powerful producers and directors. While Schatz's claim that the auteur theory is “adolescent romanticism” may be a bit extreme, the notion of evaluating a classic Hollywood film solely as the product of an individual creative personality seems spurious. Of course, some powerful directors did manage to leave their mark on many of the films they worked on—Schatz cites John Ford, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, and Alfred Hitchcock as directors “who had an unusual degree of authority and a certain style.”
¹⁷
And, as I have argued here, Wyler, too, possessed a “certain style.” He practically introduced depth of focus into the vocabulary of American cinema, and he, too, held an “unusual degree of authority,” producing twelve of his films and wielding considerable control over many others.

Wyler grew up in the business by working with two powerful producers—his cousin Carl Laemmle, who founded Universal Pictures, and Samuel Goldwyn. He learned something about power and artistic control on one of his earliest jobs, as an assistant on
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
(1923). Laemmle's production chief was Irving Thalberg, who treated the picture like a prestige project, even constructing a replica of Notre Dame Cathedral on the studio's back lot. Then, dissatisfied with the look of the film, Thalberg insisted on retakes with larger crowd scenes, and he made other budgetary decisions without consulting either Laemmle or the New York office. The resulting rift with the studio head was an object lesson to Thalberg: he could not change the culture at Universal, and he left the studio shortly thereafter. Wyler would have his own troubles with Laemmle and his son, beginning with the studio's first sound film,
Hell's Heroes
, which he directed on location (see
chapter 1
). In 1932, Wyler and his friend John Huston looked into developing their own projects, which they pitched to the studio. None of them ever got to the production stage.

Wyler's most important association was with Samuel Goldwyn, for whom he worked after leaving Universal. Their contentious relationship began in 1936 and continued until after the war, culminating in Goldwyn's only Academy Award–winning film,
The Best Years of Our Lives
. Wyler chafed under the powerful producer's control, but he later admitted in an interview with his daughter, “He was the most important producer in my career because we made a series of pictures that were both critically and financially successful.” He added, “We had fights, but the fights were not over money. They were over…matters of taste.”
¹⁸
They also reflected the inevitable clashes between two determined individuals who were each striving for a kind of perfection—Goldwyn pursued quality properties, and most of the films Wyler made for him were based on successful plays, but Wyler's own meticulousness often got in the way of Goldwyn's need to maintain something resembling a bottom line.

Still, the two had enormous respect for each other, and as Scott Berg observed, they had other things in common: “A rapport developed between the two men, partly because of their near-equal inability to express themselves. Deeper than that, after years of working almost exclusively with Gentile directors, Goldwyn had found a fellow European Jew with similar artistic aspirations.”
¹⁹
If Goldwyn provided Wyler with the materials that released his genius, the director certainly gave Samuel Goldwyn Productions a measure of cachet it had not enjoyed before. Five of the films Wyler directed for Goldwyn were nominated for Best Picture Oscars. Berg wrote that Wyler's first film for Goldwyn,
These Three
, “gathered notices the likes of which Goldwyn had not received before. In language more thoughtful than the usual Hollywood superlatives, they treated the film with artistic respect, especially the demanding English critics.”
²⁰

In fact, the legendary “Goldwyn touch” should more properly be called the “Wyler touch.” All of Goldwyn's best films were directed by Wyler, and after his departure in 1946, most of the producer's subsequent films were undistinguished. As Danny Mandell, who edited a number of Wyler's films and countless others for Goldwyn, remarked, “I never knew what the Goldwyn touch was. I think it was something a Goldwyn publicist made up.” Wyler himself was more direct: “I don't recall his contributing anything other than buying good material and talent. It was all an attempt to make a name for himself as an artist. But as far as being creative, he was a zero.”
²¹
Wyler was surely being overly harsh, for he did admire Goldwyn's respect for talent and his desire to hire the best people, especially writers. But Wyler was protective of his legacy to the end. In 1980, the year before he died, he exclaimed to Berg, “Tell me, which pictures have the ‘Goldwyn touch' that I didn't direct?”
²²

Nearly all of Wyler's prewar films for Goldwyn engage with social issues. His first film for Goldwyn,
These Three
(1936), examines the destructive force of lies and evil intent. Many American films released that year were still dealing with the Depression, even though the economy was finally on the upswing. But Wyler's film—unsurprisingly, considering his European roots—focuses instead on the impending storm abroad.
Dead End
(1937) is based on an agitprop play of the same name by Sidney Kingsley. Here, Wyler exposes the debilitating effects of slum life as a breeding ground for gangs, gangsters, the breakup of families, and prostitution. As a Depression film, it also deals with unemployment, the violence visited on strikers demanding better wages, and the damaging divide between the wealthy and the poor.
The Little Foxes
(1941), his second Lillian Hellman adaptation in five years, further demonstrates how rampant capitalism and industrialism can destroy a family, ravage a community, and rape the land.

Wyler, like many of his colleagues and friends in the film industry, was fully committed to the American war effort, both prior to U.S. engagement and during combat. He directed one of the most acclaimed documentaries of the war,
Memphis Belle
(1944), which is the only film ever reviewed on the front page of the
New York Times
. Some years after the war, in a letter to Y. Frank Freeman, production chief at Paramount, he explained his personal engagement: “As a foreign-born American I was perhaps more alarmed from the beginning by the threat of Nazism than the average American.”
²³

Born into a Jewish family in Mulhouse, France, Wyler was twelve years old when World War I began. His birthplace was fought over by the French and German armies, and Wyler told his biographer about spending the night in the cellar and emerging in the morning to learn whether he was French or German.
²⁴
The Germans occupied the town until the end of the war, when it was taken over by the French. Interestingly, Mulhouse was also the birthplace of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish military officer accused of treason for being pro-German. Members of the Dreyfus family were still living in Mulhouse when Wyler was a boy, and the lessons of the “Dreyfus affair,” which consumed France for over a decade and served as an index of French anti-Semitism, were not lost on him. In fact, Wyler's files indicate that he actively tried to rescue relatives in Europe before and during the Second World War and succeeded in saving a member of the Dreyfus family.

Before America's entry into World War II, Wyler accepted an assignment at MGM to make
Mrs. Miniver
(1942), which he always referred to, proudly, as a propaganda film. He started work on the film when the United States was still technically neutral, thus making the story's interventionist bent potentially controversial; then he upped the ante by significantly altering a scene in which Mrs. Miniver encounters a downed Nazi pilot on her property. In a late script version, the pilot is presented sympathetically, as a young man who reminds Mrs. Miniver of her son, who recently joined the British Air Force; she cleans his wounds and offers him tea. But Wyler scrapped all this sentimental harmony and turned the pilot, in his words, into a “typical little Nazi son-of-a-bitch” who threatens Mrs. Miniver and predicts, “We will come. We will bomb your cities, like Barcelona, Warschau, Navik, Rotterdam. Rotterdam we destroy in two hours.” Louis B. Mayer, fearful of offending his foreign audiences, wanted the scene to remain as written, but Wyler held his ground. Then, when Pearl Harbor was bombed, Mayer relented, and Wyler's version prevailed. He further sharpened the film's message by coauthoring a new speech to be given by the vicar in the partially bombed-out church, calling the fight against the Nazis “the people's war.” By this time, the vicar was addressing American audiences as well, and the speech was so effective that it was printed in many publications, including
Time
and
Look
.

As early as 1941, Wyler had tried to join the war effort personally, volunteering for the Army Signal Corps, but he was turned down. When he finally received his commission as a major in the Army Air Force in 1942, his orders were to produce films about the Eighth Air Force, designed to boost morale.
Memphis Belle
(1944) deals with the crew of a Flying Fortress from the Eighth Air Force on its last mission, and
Thunderbolt
(1945) chronicles how the face of Italy was changed from the air. In an essay titled “Flying over Germany,” Wyler wrote about the spirit of community aboard a plane, which became a living testimonial to his notion of humanism: “You're inclined to worship the skipper once he's brought you back safely and look on all other men on board as brothers. They depend on each other. They save each other's lives every day.”
²⁵

The chasm between that ideal and the reality of the postwar experience became one of the central themes of Wyler's masterpiece,
The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946). That film reflects Wyler's own feelings as a war veteran and, as such, is his most personal film. The narrative follows three returning servicemen who encounter problems while trying to reintegrate themselves into society, and it explores some of the same issues of the postwar culture that were laid bare in Arthur Miller's
All My Sons
, which opened on Broadway a year later. When Wyler's character Al Stephenson remarks, “Last year it was kill Japs, and this year it's make money,” he is sounding the disillusionment of countless citizen-soldiers. The film raises other vital issues as well: unemployment, strikes, and volatile labor conditions; the specter of another war—when “none of us will have to worry because we'll be blown to bits the first day”—versus American isolationism; and the ongoing trend of small businesses being taken over by conglomerates and chains.

Best Years
won Wyler his second Oscar and marked the end of his association with Goldwyn. In July 1945, he entered into an ambitious venture with Frank Capra and Samuel Briskin to found Liberty Films, an independent film company designed to “allow each individual complete freedom to pursue his own creative bent and retain his artistic integrity.” This enterprise—which was soon joined by George Stevens—grew out of these directors' war experiences, which changed the way they thought about film and its relevance to society. In his essay on Wyler, Bazin quotes the director's comment on
Best Years:
“Without this experience, I could not have made my movie the way I did. We had learned to better comprehend the world…I know that George Stevens isn't the same since he saw the bodies at Dachau. We were forced to see that Hollywood hardly reflected the world or the time we lived in.”
²⁶

Liberty Films released only one film, Capra's
It's a Wonderful Life
(1946), before cash-flow problems forced a sale to Paramount, which signed Wyler to a five-picture deal and guaranteed him artistic independence. Although he soon learned that the studio would insist on project and budget approval, thus compromising his independence, Wyler's choice of projects reflected his engagement with postwar issues. Like the post-Dachau films of Stevens, Wyler's postwar films projected a much darker vision than his prewar work.