William Wyler (32 page)

The most famous scene in both the film and the play depicts Horace's heart attack and Regina's reaction to it. Bazin analyzes this scene in detail as a supreme example of deep focus: Regina's immobile face is seen in the front of the frame, while Horace struggles up the stairs to fetch his medicine in the background. Prior to that moment, Regina, wearing a black veil over a hat with a large feather, is pictured within a curtained entrance— she seems ready for the kill. Again, Wyler emphasizes the Hubbards' theatrical nature and how much they enjoy being on display. The framing, however, indicates that the director is very much in control of the action. Horace, who is seated like a spectator, tries to take the upper hand, telling Regina that he knows Leo stole the bonds but will take no action against his nephew. Instead, he will consider the bonds a loan and intends to leave them to Regina in his will; Alexandra will inherit everything else. When Regina seems incredulous about the missing bonds, he insists that she look in the safe-deposit box. When she does, Wyler frames her face in the lid of the box. Horace seems to be in control, but not for long.

Regina retaliates by destroying what is left of Horace's pride, telling him that she has always found him repellent and has used a variety of excuses to avoid having sex with him. She says she married him in the hope that he would give her the world, but he turned out to be only a “small-town clerk.” Regina is thus revealed as another Wyler protagonist who has married for money, only to be bitterly disappointed. As Regina speaks, Wyler repeats the earlier framing of her walking to the window. It is now raining outside—always an ominous sign in a Wyler film.
⁴⁰
However, unlike the scene after the dinner party for Marshall, the front of the frame is now shared by Horace's stricken face. Regina moves to the couch at the center of the frame and reclines, as if she enjoys humiliating her husband. In the play, she boasts of cheating on him to retaliate for his dalliance with “fancy women,” but this accusation is omitted in the film, both because it would compromise the audience's sympathy for Horace and, more important, because it would have offended the Breen office.

At this point, Horace suffers a heart attack and, while trying to reach his medicine, knocks the bottle to the floor. Regina remains immobile, her look dispassionate and hard. She has assumed the role of spectator— though one whose gaze dominates the action. This scene is often praised for its effective use of deep focus, in that it exposes two planes of action at once: Regina's fixed expression, and Horace in the background, struggling up the stairs to secure another bottle of medicine. The scene, however, belongs to Regina, whose
in
action remains the focal point, while our view of Horace is blurred. Wyler downplayed the deep-focus aspect of the scene, however, explaining its strategy in purely utilitarian terms: “Now there was another thing about this scene that nobody knows, aside from what we're talking about, deep focus. Herbert Marshall…has a wooden leg and cannot go up the stairs like he was supposed to. This is a kind of secret…a professional secret which I'm giving away here. If you ever see the picture again, he walks out of the scene and a double comes in the background and he starts going up the stairs but he's so far in the background that you can't tell who he is.”
⁴¹

Wyler effectively employs deep focus again, shortly after this scene. After Horace's death, Regina once again has power over her brothers. Seated in the front of the frame, she dictates her terms to Ben, who is behind the couch and centered, and to Leo and Oscar in the rear, framed by curtains—helpless players in the struggle between Regina and her more powerful brother. Regina wants 75 percent of the business, and she threatens all of them with jail if they do not cooperate. Meanwhile, Alexandra is seen descending the stairs in deep focus. Regina, undaunted by what her daughter has heard, finishes her threat and dismisses the men.

The film ends as the play does, with Alexandra rejecting her mother. Wyler films this pivotal moment as Regina ascends the stairs and Alexandra remains at the foot. Alexandra declares that she will not stand by and watch her mother and her kind “eat the earth.” Regina asks her daughter to spend the night with her, but before she does so, Wyler has her look at the door of Horace's room, and the camera lingers on it. It is a poignant moment that emphasizes Regina's loneliness and fear—a cinematic gesture that expands and enlarges on the literary text. Alexandra refuses and offers a veiled challenge: “Are you afraid, Mama?” These lines conclude the play but not the film, which shows Alexandra leaving the house as Regina struggles to maintain her composure. She manages to assume the steely expression she wore during Horace's death scene, but there is a slight crack now. Wyler then cuts to a curtained window, behind which is a shadow. The curtains open to reveal Regina's face, framed by the bars of the window, as she watches Alexandra and David leave together. Her face becomes engulfed in darkness as the film ends.

Wyler's cinematic ending is a significant improvement over the one in Hellman's script, which has Alexandra telling David that she is going away to learn to stand on her own and fight. She assures Addie, who wants to go with her, that she remembers a song Addie taught her: “You got to live a life of service. You got to live it by yo'sef.” She then asks David if he loves her and if he will wait for her. David replies, “Whenever it is, I'll be waiting for you.” Hellman's ending thus focuses on Alexandra's conversion. It is very much the upbeat conclusion of a political play in which a character rejects the corrupt politics of the present and vows to reform both herself and the world (just as Tom Joad does at the end of John Ford's
The Grapes of Wrath
, released a year earlier). Instead, Wyler ends with the image of Regina isolated, alone, and defeated—as he did with Barney in
Come and Get It
and as he might have with Fran screaming in
Dodsworth
. Regina is yet another Wyler character who has sacrificed everything for material gain and ended up with nothing.

The Little Foxes
finished filming on July 3, 1941, ten days after its projected June 23 wrap date. Its total cost was somewhat over $1 million. The shoot was exhausting for both Wyler and Davis, who fought regularly. Wyler told a reporter for the
New York World Telegram
, “I'm not knocking Bette for she is a great actress, but I am relieved the picture is done. Maybe she is just as relieved.”
⁴²
Davis later told Whitney Stine: “To be happy to have a film with Wyler as the director finished was indeed heartbreak for me. He has never asked me to be in [another] one of his films in all these years. I have few ambitions left—one is to do one more film with Willie before I end my career.”
⁴³
They corresponded on and off about the possibility of doing another project together, and in 1947, Davis contacted Wyler about directing her in
Hedda Gabler
, but nothing came of it.

Hellman's attitude was curiously ambivalent. When she first saw the film, shortly before its release, she wrote to the Kobers that it was a “fine picture as pictures go but it should have been better and I think Willy did a bad job.”
⁴⁴
Implying that he was frightened of being labeled melodramatic, she complained to Wyler himself that the film did “not hit hard enough,” was “choppy in the beginning,” and jumped around too much.
⁴⁵
She backpedaled in her letter to the Kobers, however, describing Wyler's direction as superior to anything she had seen for some time. Forty years later, she must have softened even further, for she told Austin Pendleton, who was directing a Broadway revival of
The Little Foxes
with Elizabeth Taylor: “The one that came closest to what I intended was Willie Wyler's film.”
⁴⁶

Mrs. Miniver
(1942),
Memphis Belle
(1944),
Thunderbolt
(1945)

In 1941, MGM, the biggest and most glamorous studio in Hollywood, borrowed Wyler to work with producer Sidney Franklin—and, by extension, Louis B. Mayer—on an adaptation of
Mrs. Miniver
. The film would be based on a series of loosely connected stories by Jan Struther that had originally appeared in the
London Times
and were later published as a book in 1939. The stories present an idealized portrait of an upper-class, though not aristocratic, English family enjoying the communal world and family life to which their affluence entitles them. The Miniver stories gain drama and some poignancy from allusions to the impending war, which threatens their way of life.

Sidney Franklin had enjoyed a successful career as a director for Irving Thalberg (
The Good Earth
); after Thalberg's death, Franklin became a producer and was noted for his elegance and taste. His other notable directorial efforts include
The Dark Angel
(Lillian Hellman's first screenwriting credit, and the vehicle for an Oscar-nominated performance by Merle Oberon), Noël Coward's
Private Lives
, and
The Guardsman
(starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne). Wyler was still directing
The Little Foxes
when Franklin started courting him for this project. Wyler jumped at the chance to work with Franklin. During a lunch meeting, Franklin insisted on reading Wyler the script, and before he was halfway through, Wyler had agreed to direct the film.

The script for
Mrs. Miniver
utilized very few incidents from the book. The screenwriters—Arthur Wimperis, James Hilton, George Froeschel, and Claudine West—kept a few plot details but essentially refashioned the book's episodic structure into a well-crafted, unified story that focuses on the war. The script actually began where the book left off, in September 1939, just as England declares war on Germany. The screenwriters added the central subplot of Lady Beldon and the rose-growing contest with the local stationmaster, Mr. Ballard, which adds an element of social commentary on British class conflict and shows how the war started the process of bringing the classes together. (The coming together of the classes also makes the Minivers' world seem more American.) The romance between Lady Beldon's granddaughter, Carol, and Vin Miniver was also added. Most important, the entire Miniver saga was transformed into a propaganda piece in support of America's joining the European conflict.

Wyler began shooting
Mrs. Miniver
in November 1941, when the United States was still technically neutral, even though Roosevelt, in his “Four Freedoms” speech in January, had stated: “Every realist knows that the democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world.”
¹
Wyler had always been an ardent supporter of FDR and was vehemently anti-Nazi. More than a decade later, while being investigated by the HUAC, he explained his politics in a draft letter prepared for Y. Frank Freeman, production chief at Paramount: “My interest in any organizations of a political nature began during the Roosevelt Era here and the rise of Nazism abroad…. As a foreign-born American I was perhaps more alarmed from the beginning by the threat of Nazism than the average American. As one who had spent his childhood in a country constantly fought over, Alsace-Lorraine, and its people divided into two nationalist groups, I understood that extreme nationalism always leads to loss of freedom for the people.”
²
At the end of his life, he stated categorically, “I was a war monger. I was concerned about Americans being isolationists.
Mrs. Miniver
obviously was a propaganda film.”
³

MGM, the studio with the most stars and the most money, was originally gun-shy about producing films that smacked of controversy. As the war in Europe escalated, however, and more European markets were closed to American films, some filmmakers began to insert pro-war sentiments into their work. As early as 1939—and in spite of objections from the Breen office—Warner Brothers released
Confessions of a Nazi Spy
, which exposed pro-Nazi organizations in America. That same year, fellow émigré Fred Zinnemann, whom Wyler had employed as a consultant for
These Three
and was now working in MGM's shorts department, made a one-reel film for its Crime Does Not Pay series about espionage in the United States. In 1940, Alfred Hitchcock made
Foreign Correspondent
, which closes with a speech delivered by Joel McCrea (playing an American correspondent in London reporting on the Blitz) that probably served as a model for the concluding speech in
Mrs. Miniver
, written in part by Wyler. (Hitchcock would continue his cinematic war against the Nazis with
Saboteur
, released the same year as Wyler's film.) Also in 1940, Charlie Chaplin satirized Hitler in
The Great Dictator
, which culminated in a speech urging people everywhere to unite and fight for freedom.

In the summer of 1941, these films and others prompted two isolationist U.S. senators, Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota and Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri, to launch an investigation into propaganda disseminated by Hollywood films. This inquiry was tied to a probe of the allegedly monopolistic practices of the eight major studios, whose vertical integration allowed them to exhibit their films in their own theaters.
⁴
Harry Warner, Darryl Zanuck, and attorney Wendell Willkie defended the studios against these charges. Nye was a popular figure with the fascist-friendly America-First Committee, and his racist and anti-Semitic ranting against the foreigners who ran Hollywood—a place he described as swarming “with refugees and British actors”
⁵
—eventually caused the press to condemn him in print. The senators were discredited both by their antiforeigner views and by their ignorance of the films they condemned. When Clark was asked to back up his claims against Warner Brothers by producing evidence from the films, he proclaimed: “No, I have not seen any of them. I am not going to see any of them.”
⁶
The bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, effectively ended the investigation.

While these debates were raging in the Senate, the Office of War Information (OWI) was trying to get the Hollywood studios to release films that emphasized America's connection to England and its other allies. Lowell Mellett, chief of the OWI's Bureau of Motion Pictures, said at a gathering of film producers, “We would like to see pictures that dramatize the underlying causes of the war and the reason why we fight. Unless the public understands these, the war may be meaningless.”
⁷
Roosevelt's secret meeting with Winston Churchill off the coast of Newfoundland, where the Atlantic Charter was issued, cemented the partnership between the two countries even before the United States entered the war. Many Americans, however, viewed England as a class-ridden society that was not truly democratic. According to Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, “Though the British upper classes fascinated Americans, they also produced an opposite reaction. Roosevelt thought Britain's trouble was ‘too much Eton and Oxford.'”
⁸
Hollywood's delight in presenting films about the British aristocracy and their imperialist policies would have to be tempered in favor of stories that accentuated their democratic spirit.
⁹
Although
Mrs. Miniver
was made before the OWI achieved much influence in Hollywood, it celebrates the connection between the two countries that the U.S. government wanted the film industry to showcase.

Wyler always envisioned
Mrs. Miniver
as a serious propaganda film. In 1942, he told Hedda Hopper, “People say we should be making escapist pictures today. I say ‘Why? This is the [
sic
] hell of a time to escape from reality! We're in an all-out war—a people's war—it's the time to face it. Let's make propaganda pictures, but make them good.'”
¹⁰
Wyler's trademark perfectionism, however, grated on the nerves of a variety of individuals, particularly the film's star, Greer Garson, and set designer Cedric Gibbons. As a result, producer Franklin had to work hard to keep everyone on an even keel. In his quest for realism, Wyler wanted to make the film at the Denham Studio in London, but the war prevented it. Instead, he was forced to film at Culver City, where the sets, designed in MGM's lavish style, created a “chocolate box world of rose strewn villages, landed gentry and old family retainers.”
¹¹
Wyler despised the set.

Wyler even quarreled with Louis B. Mayer over one of the film's most famous scenes—when Mrs. Miniver encounters a downed Nazi pilot. In a late script version,
¹²
the German is depicted rather sympathetically, suggesting that he reminds Mrs. Miniver of her son Vin, who recently volunteered for the British Air Force. She spends time cleaning and dressing his wounds; speaks to him about his duties, hoping to get a better understanding of Vin's military life; and even offers him tea. Wyler, who thought the sympathy for the Nazi was carried too far, refused to film the scene as written and as Mayer wanted. Wyler declared: “Mr. Mayer, if I had several Germans in the picture, I wouldn't mind having one who was a decent young fellow. But I've only got one German. And if I make this picture, this one German is going to be a typical little Nazi son-of-a-bitch. He's not going to be a friendly little pilot but one of Goering's monsters.”
¹³
Mayer, who did not want to offend his foreign audience—particularly his German audience—finally relented. And once Pearl Harbor happened, the incident was forgotten.

Wyler also made some key emendations to the script. For instance, he cut a prologue that opens in an old-fashioned upper-class London club. As an English gentleman is about to depart, he asks the score of a cricket game and banters with a stockbroker about investing in aircraft, since the price is going up. He leaves and is then seen entering his apartment, where his secretary is waiting. He tells her that he has had a moment of inspiration, asks not to be disturbed, and starts dictating in German, which then changes to English. What follows is a radio broadcast. In the original concept, this character's broadcasts were intended to be cut into the film at various points, interrupting the action. Wyler retains only one of these broadcasts, which is heard at a pub until one of the patrons quickly turns off the radio. The original character is arrogant and reprehensible, and although Wyler clearly had no qualms about presenting Germans this way, he obviously considered this device dramatically inept; he preferred to present his material in ways that emerged more effectively from the story.
¹⁴

The early script's opening broadcast offers the following diatribe: “In this report I shall deal with the class that is most accurately representative of any nation—the Middle Class. The Middle Class was once the bulwark of England's greatness—but today, moved by a frantic urge to ape the luxury and ostentation of the class above them, they have no aim in life save the preservation of their own material security…. Self indulgent, comfort-loving, materialistic, the Middle Class of England, in its decadence, will offer little resistance to the world domination of a master race.”
¹⁵
Although Wyler was interested in propaganda, this was just the kind of clumsy, overstated writing he wanted to avoid. He begins the film, instead, with a written prologue that offers a testament to the values of the English people, who are described as a “happy, careless people who work and play, rear their children…soon to be fighting desperately for their way of life and for life itself.” Wyler wanted to put his audience in an inclusive mood, and he chose to do so by Americanizing the Minivers into an English version of MGM's Hardy family.

The original script contained further references to the materialism of the middle class, much of which Wyler eliminated. Instead, he has the aristocratic Lady Beldon (Dame May Whitty) deliver lines about the unfortunate blurring of class differences in an offhand, humorous way that makes the point but softens the impact. Wyler's film emphasizes that the English want the same things Americans do—to work hard, to live comfortably and in peace, and to enjoy their prosperity, which occasionally means buying nice things like new hats and cars.

Arthur Wimperis helped Wyler inject more realism into the script. Because of his experiences as an air-raid warden and a river patrolman, he was able to lend some authenticity to parts of the film. He also contributed details to the depiction of Belham, the fictional town where the Minivers live, giving it some of the attributes of his own hometown. Wimperis placed Belham on the banks of the Thames so that he could incorporate the story of Clem and the Battle of Dunkirk, which he had learned about from friends. British playwright R. C. Sheriff was later hired to write the bomb-shelter scene.
¹⁶

Wyler's reputation initially discouraged actor Walter Pidgeon, who remarked, “I heard so many tales about William Wyler that I decided not to do it.”
¹⁷
Eddie Mannix, an executive at MGM, finally talked him into taking the part of Clem Miniver. Greer Garson was not MGM's first choice to play Mrs. Miniver. Norma Shearer had already turned down the role. Shearer, too, had initially been put off by the prospect of working with Wyler, and he confirmed her misgivings. When she suggested that in order to play the mother of a twenty-year-old son she would have to be aged, Wyler undiplomatically told her that she looked just right for the part. He later apologized, explaining that the character was ageless and the role should be played by someone as young and attractive as possible.

On the first day of shooting, Garson tried to defuse any tension by presenting the autocratic Wyler with a pair of black velvet gloves, which he wore the entire day. But over time, Wyler's method of reshooting scenes angered and frustrated her, and their relationship deteriorated. He once asked her to light Walter Pidgeon's cigarette so many times in one scene that she became ill from inhaling too much smoke. Bette Davis, however, assured Garson that if she were patient, she would give the performance of her career under Wyler's direction. Garson eventually acknowledged that Wyler was indeed a master director, and like Davis, she won an Oscar under his guidance. During one emotional scene, she recollected, “Willy came over to me and said, ‘The tears in your eyes. That was very good. But you let them spill over one second too soon. Now if you get the tears again, I want you to hold them there. And then I want you to let that tear run down your cheek.'” Garson did as she was told, and when the camera moved in on her again, “the tear obligingly and obediently rode out and down my cheek.”
¹⁸