William Wyler (4 page)

To be sure, Wyler's work throughout his career invariably tilted toward the somber and grim aspects of life. His first two sound films,
Hell's Heroes
(1930) and A
House Divided
(1931), reflect a bleak worldview veering toward despair. The earlier film was the third version of Peter B. Kyne's popular western retelling of the Gospel according to Matthew,
The Three Godfathers
(1913). Unlike those other cinematic adaptations, Wyler's version, which Kyne detested, pointedly lacks any mitigating layer of sentimental Christian allegory. His protagonist, though ultimately redeemed by sacrificing his own life while delivering an orphaned infant to safety, is portrayed as a hard, selfish man who, along with his fellow bandits, traverses a desert wasteland. In some early examples of deep focus, Wyler emphasizes the empty, hostile quality of the terrain, even instructing his cameraman to make the landscape “look horrible.”

Like
Hell's Heroes
, his next project opens and closes with images of death. Although its locale is a fishing village, the action of A
House Divided
takes place primarily inside the home of Seth Law, whose destructive Oedipal relationship with his son is exacerbated when the father's young mail-order bride falls in love with the son instead. Utilizing the indoor scenes that would become a hallmark of his later work, Wyler emphasizes the tyranny of confined space, vertical lines, and staircases as he drags—literally, in Seth's case—his conflicted characters through an emotional catharsis. The final scene, uniting the young lovers, echoes the safe deliverance of the baby at the conclusion of the earlier film, but both “happy endings” come at the expense of the death of the “fathers,” thus capping off the depiction of a world so bleak and closed off that the audience feels no real emotional release.

Wyler's films for Goldwyn often reflect the split between the producer's penchant for happy endings and the director's desire for resolutions that include at least some ambiguity. In
Dodsworth
(1936), the final image of Fran screaming above the din of the crowd, “He's going ashore! He's going ashore!” after her husband decides to leave her is one of the most devastating moments in all of Wyler's work. By almost losing sight of the abandoned woman among the passengers milling about on the ocean liner's deck, the director visually seals her desolation. The Sidney Howard play on which the film is based ends on that note, but the film ends with Sam Dodsworth's return to Edith Cortwright—a contrived depiction of happiness that feels intrusive after the dramatic power of the earlier image.

Wyler provides a variation on that image of desperation in
Come and Get It
, released the same year as
Dodsworth
. This film, which Wyler took over from Howard Hawks at Goldwyn's insistence, ends with Lotta Bostrom leaving Barney Glasgow to run off with the man she loves, his son Richard. Like Fran Dodsworth, Barney has failed to recognize that it is too late to save this discordant relationship—in his case, because he is old and cannot give the younger woman what she wants. Wyler ends the film with Barney calling his guests to dinner by grimly ringing the same triangle he once used as a young lumberjack. Barney's face is framed in the triangle, clearly indicating that he is now trapped by the acknowledgment that his youth is over and his earlier decision to marry for money rather than love has blighted his life.

A similar visual strategy is employed in
The Little Foxes
(1941), Wyler's film version of Lillian Hellman's play. As she had in her first collaboration with Wyler—on
These Three
, based on her first hit play
The Children's Hour
—the playwright suggested substantive revisions to her work. Her major change was to add a love interest for Regina Giddens's daughter Alexandra (Zan), in order to enlarge and humanize the character. Whereas Zan's forceful repudiation of her mother's values concludes the play, Hellman's screenplay ends with the actual departure of the daughter and her lover as they run off together, presented from Regina's point of view. Wyler cuts to a final shot of Regina's face, which is framed by the bars of the window. As she watches the young couple leave, her face becomes engulfed in darkness, a final judgment on the life she has led.

The corrupting effects of money, explored in the turn-of-the-century setting of
Little Foxes
, was a theme Wyler returned to in the postwar
Best
Years of Our Lives
, with its critical reflections on banking, the rise of chain stores, and hometown businessmen's failure to accommodate returning soldiers. His first film for Paramount,
The Heiress
(1949), though set in 1850s New York, picks up on this theme. Once again choosing to adapt a successful play—this one based on Henry James's
Washington Square
—Wyler delivers a claustrophobic film whose action delves into the dark forces of money and revenge. Catherine Sloper, the heiress of the title, is a shy, plain woman who will be worth “thirty thousand a year” upon the death of her father, a prominent doctor. That money comes between Catherine and her father when she falls in love with a fortune hunter, Morris Townsend. Catherine eventually learns that Morris's affections are indeed motivated by greed and that her father has no more feeling for her than her mercenary suitor does. All the relationships in the film are poisoned and then destroyed by money.

Carrie
(1952) was a logical successor to
The Heiress
because its central character, Carrie Meeber, is, like Morris Townsend, motivated by a powerful desire for the security and pleasure that money can buy. Carrie's quest for these advantages no doubt interested Wyler because it allowed him to focus his artistry on social issues prevalent in American society. Her struggle for upward mobility is paralleled by the story of George Hurstwood, who gives up a successful career, as well as a fine home and family, to marry Carrie. His fall from grace seems to mock the romantic aspirations of characters like Catherine Sloper and Barney Glasgow, for in the Darwinian America of this film, love is a mere sideshow.

Carrie
's script contains a number of scenes that powerfully portray the underside of the American dream, but some of them did not make the final cut because the studio deleted them while Wyler was in Italy making
Roman Holiday
. (One scene, which takes place in a homeless shelter, was restored in the DVD version released in 2005.) Both
The Heiress
and
Carrie
end with a death image: the final shot of Catherine Sloper is of a woman who has chosen death in life, while Wyler ends the later film with Hurstwood's fall rather than Carrie's rise. The released film merely shows Hurstwood manipulating the burners of the stove in Carrie's dressing room, a foreshadowing of his suicide that was more directly represented in Wyler's version.
Carrie
, in the director's words, “showed America in an unflattering light.”
²⁷
It was too uncompromising for its time.

The abusive actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee affected Wyler's personal life as well as his professional one. When that committee began issuing subpoenas in 1947, he joined John Huston and Philip Dunne in founding the Committee for the First Amendment (CFA), whose stated aim was to defend individual constitutional rights and decry any attempt “to throttle freedom of expression.” The CFA chartered a plane that flew many high-profile stars to the hearings as a show of support, but the hostile behavior of the group known as the Hollywood Ten divided the CFA, and some members drifted away. Others were pressured by the studios and their agents to renounce their support of the Hollywood Ten. Even Wyler was forced to resign from the group, which was in tatters, and the CFA soon disbanded.

Two of Wyler's projects in the wake of the HUAC hearings reflect his attitude toward the committee's actions.
Detective Story
(1951), his second partnering with playwright Sidney Kingsley (the first was
Dead End
in 1937), concerns a troubled protagonist—a police officer with intolerant views and a tendency to bend the law to enforce his own judgments. Writing about the play years later, Kingsley described this character's motives as follows: “He wants to achieve efficiency by taking the law into his own hands by making people abide by the right as he sees it.”
²⁸
The parallel to the HUAC and the imposition of its will on artists and intellectuals was not lost on Wyler, who completed the film in record time.

Wyler left for Italy to direct
Roman Holiday
in large part to escape the poisonous political atmosphere, though it hounded him even there. That film, a comedy made on location, is open and vibrant—a far cry from the cramped and conflicted
Detective Story
. Yet even that project, which hardly seems political at all, was tinged by the blacklist, for the original story was penned by Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten. (Trumbo's name did not appear on the film when it was released; Ian McLellan Hunter fronted for him and received an Oscar.)
²⁹

Wyler's last film for Paramount reflects the somber and sour mood that overwhelmed him when he returned to America. He asked the studio to buy the rights to Joseph Hayes's best-selling book
The Desperate Hours
(which was also dramatized for the stage). Like
Detective Story
, it is an indoor film that tells the story of three escaped convicts who terrorize a suburban family, holding them hostage inside their own home. Reflecting the anxiety and paranoia of 1950s America—which Wyler feared was threatening the traditions of individual liberty—
The Desperate Hours
became a parable, warning against the use of force as a mechanism for social control.

Wyler's preoccupation with the issues raised by the war and the HUAC era continued after he left Paramount, resulting in a series of films questioning the limits of pacifism and individual conscience. Between 1956 and 1959, he made
Friendly Persuasion, The Big Country
, and
Ben-Hur
, each of which deals with these questions in different ways.

What intrigued Wyler about Jessamyn West's series of interrelated stories about a Quaker farm family in mid-nineteenth-century Indiana was the quandary of a committed pacifist when personally confronted with the prospect of violence. When he first met with West, who would coauthor the screenplay for
Friendly Persuasion
, Wyler told her that he was no Quaker—his experiences in the war had convinced him that evil had to be resisted with violence. Wyler wanted to confront this issue more forcefully than West had done in her book, but his film version ultimately suffers from a failure of nerve. Jess, the father, is shown to be a man of principle; in Wyler's words, “He was honest about his doubts, he was the reasoning man. He was the best Quaker of all.”
³⁰
Jess is certainly the most sympathetic character in the film, but the scene in which he is tempted to resort to violence but resists lacks any real drama or conviction, and Wyler never follows up to show how the battle experience affects Jess's son. Unlike
Mrs. Miniver, Friendly Persuasion
ends with an almost comical return to normalcy—never having explored the war's impact on the Quaker family or the community it represents. Despite the darker and more dramatic ambitions of Wyler's final shooting script, the released film dodges the questions Wyler wanted to raise.

In
The Big Country
, Wyler utilizes the western genre to tell the story of an eastern hero who comes out west to marry the woman he loves. A peaceful man in a violent country, he refuses to be lured into the feud that consumes his fiancée's father or to be goaded into fistfights by the local bullies. Wyler thus tries to invert the classic western formula by substituting a pacifist hero, a man who does not carry a gun and refuses to use one, even when pushed into a duel with the son of the enemy. Nonetheless, the film concludes with a violent confrontation between the two feuding landowners, which Wyler films partially in a heroic style in an apparent effort to compensate for the anticlimax of the younger men's indecisive meeting. By trying to have it both ways, he hopelessly compromises the film's message.

Both these “pacifist” films seem to confirm that Wyler himself was not a pacifist. Two world wars had taught him that human nature is dark, flawed, and at times inexplicably evil, and there is no way to deal with it other than through violent confrontation. In both films, Wyler indeed demonstrates that he is “no Quaker.”

He explores this issue most effectively in
Ben-Hur
, a film about political tyranny, betrayal, and, once again, the limits of pacifism. Judah Ben-Hur, a prince of Judea, is opposed to the tyranny of the Roman occupation but also preaches nonviolence in an effort to prevent armed conflict. He turns violent, however, when his childhood friend Messala betrays him, arrests his family, and condemns him to the life of a galley slave. Ben-Hur shows strength of character by saving the commander of his ship during a battle, but his hatred of Messala indirectly leads to his enemy's death during the famous chariot race scene. The story's pacifist message is made plain at the end, when Judah hears an account of Christ's Sermon on the Mount from his beloved, Esther. The film ends with him climbing the staircase of the family home to greet his mother and sister, who have been cured of their leprosy as Christ died on the cross. This conclusion raises some questions, however, for Wyler was not a religious man, and the sections of the film devoted to Christian themes are far less compelling than the relationships between the central characters. The Christ story is included as a concession to the source novel, and Wyler's resorting to it as a kind of deus ex machina reveals his frustration with the pacifist theme.

While the protagonists of all three films are clearly men of principle and sympathetic characters, they are also flawed messengers in worlds that are based on violence, dissension, and hatred. Perhaps because of his experiences with the HUAC, Wyler saw himself in those men—well-intentioned, committed, and humanistic, but still susceptible to compromise.