William Wyler (43 page)

Throughout much of this section, Wyler's Carrie remains devoted to Hurstwood, dealing patiently with his economic setbacks. Emotions come to a head, however, when she becomes pregnant soon after Hurstwood loses his job. Then Julia and her lawyer arrive, insisting that Hurstwood give her permission to sell their house, and Carrie is shocked to learn that Hurstwood is not divorced. Seeking to placate her, Hurstwood bargains away his share of the house, losing his chance to gain some financial stability. Shortly afterward, Carrie loses the baby. In an effort to console her, he promises that they can have another child when times get better, but Carrie attacks him, demanding, “When? When you're rich?…When you're eighty?” Later, she tells him that she is “still young” and is “going to live somehow.” In the novel, Dreiser chronicles Carrie's growing resentment of Hurstwood's failings and his age; in the film, all her bitterness comes out in this one emotional moment.

When she learns that Hurstwood is going to see his son, who is visiting New York on his honeymoon, Carrie decides to sacrifice herself and leave him, so that he will be free to return to his world. While waiting at the pier, however, Hurstwood is overcome with shame and cannot bring himself to face his son. Ironically, he returns home to find Carrie's farewell note. Dreiser's naturalistic tale of characters at the mercy of forces beyond their control suddenly becomes a story of good intentions gone awry.

The character of Carrie is domesticated enough to be sympathetic to film audiences of the time, yet liberated enough to reflect the new woman emerging in postwar films. She reflects Brandon French's contention that women in 1950s films longed for both a secure, domestic lifestyle and the adventure inherent in an unconventional way of life.
²¹
The examples of domestic reality in the film—Minnie's life of grinding poverty and the Hurstwoods' marriage, in which the pursuit of social status has destroyed any semblance of happiness—push Carrie to look for fulfillment elsewhere.
Carrie
is uncompromising in viewing marriage as a trap, and it certainly seems to be an attack on the American way of life in the 1950s, grounded in an institution wholly shaped by money.
²²

From the beginning, Wyler's Carrie displays spunk and confidence in the face of this dreary prospect. On the train, she tells Drouet that she will not end up like her sister. When Hurstwood teaches her how to play cards, she exults in beating Drouet. Ignoring Hurstwoood's help, she exclaims, “I won!” Her strength again comes to the fore when, after her miscarriage, she realizes that she can no longer devote herself to an aging husband and declares her intention “to live.” That bedside awakening is immediately followed by a scene in which she auditions for the chorus line in a musical revue. This new Carrie is a woman of action. When the director asks for her name, she answers, “Carrie Madenda”—coming up with a new identity on the spot. She will rise and succeed.

Hurstwood initially accepts Carrie's success in the theater. After her opening night, he escorts her home and encourages her dreams. He tells her to buy some good clothes and get a nice place to live, adding, “You can make your way up to that other world that I left.” Carrie responds, “You mean alone,” to which Hurstwood replies, “You're never alone up there. It's down here where it's lonesome.” These lines are telling, for they highlight the contradictions in Hurstwood's mind (and in Dreiser's), indicating that he still worships at the altar of success. Equating happiness with good clothes and a beautiful home, he evidently believes that success functions as a barrier to loneliness and despair. In this context, it is interesting that Wyler lifts an image that Dreiser associates with Carrie and transfers it to Hurstwood: Dreiser uses the rocking chair as an image of Carrie's restlessness, an activity that cannot take her to a satisfying place, whereas Wyler uses it to signify Hurstwood's isolation. He is seen a number of times rocking by a window with a newspaper in his hand, cut off from the world he once navigated successfully. Immediately after Hurstwood's reply to Carrie about the comforts of success, Wyler cuts to Hurstwood in the rocker—the epitome of one who has lost it.

Carrie leaves Hurstwood because she believes he will be happier if he reunites with his son and returns to his former life—the “other world” he left behind. That decision, however, sets him on a downward spiral. Once Carrie becomes more successful, she tries to find him again, but none of her leads proves fruitful. One evening, as she readies herself for a performance, Drouet visits her dressing room. In a scene that parallels the one in the film's first half, when he tells her that Hurstwood is married, he now informs Carrie that Hurstwood stole money before they ran away together. Drouet confesses that despite his current success, he was happier in his old apartment with Carrie. All Wyler's principals—even Drouet—learn something about the nature of success. As Drouet tells Carrie about the theft, she is looking at herself in a full-length mirror—reminiscent of her first moment as Mrs. Hurstwood, admiring her new hat just before Hurstwood is forced to return the stolen money. She has come a long way, but Wyler's camera still imprisons her in the frame, indicating that although she has gained much, she has lost more. Suddenly recognizing her part in Hurstwood's downfall, she exclaims that she has “ruined him.”

When next seen, Hurstwood is in a rooming house for derelicts. This scene, which was cut from the film shown in theaters but restored when it was released on DVD, is one of the most haunting sequences in the movie. Wyler's camera, surveying the place from above, looks down on the men, confined in individual cells that look like cages at an animal shelter. Hurstwood is sick and has just come from the hospital; his once impeccable appearance has deteriorated markedly. He is told to leave in the morning and is forced to roam the streets in search of money. Out on the street and starving, he swallows his pride and decides to ask Carrie for a handout.

Hurstwood's meeting with Carrie is filmed in a noirish style. He hides in the shadows, near the brightly lit stage door area. When Carrie emerges, her face is illuminated, while Hurstwood's remains dark. She invites him into her dressing room and orders one of the workers to bring food. When she turns on the light, Hurstwood looks away, devastated and humiliated by his appearance. When Carrie asks, “What happened?” he can only reply, “I've forgotten”—he is unable to articulate what life has done to him, or what he has done to himself. Carrie tells him that she now has security and success and wants to share it with him; she understands what he did for her and wants to reclaim his love. But Hurstwood advises her not to live in the past, telling her (repeating her words to him) she has time to find someone to love and, finally, that “it's a great experience.” At the end, he seems to be holding on to one of the reasons for his fall—the romantic notion that there is something greater than the materialism pursued by all the film's characters.

When Carrie leaves to get more money, Hurstwood removes just one coin from her purse and fingers it—this is Wyler's third use of this image—then flicks the bills back inside. The gesture of rejecting money seems to consolidate his epiphany, but as he rises to leave, Hurstwood catches sight of himself in Carrie's mirror. His desolate expression suggests that the lesson has come too late and cannot redeem him. He manipulates the burners on Carrie's stove, and we hear the hissing of the gas as Hurstwood leaves. The image hints at Hurstwood's end, and it is the only indication that remains—his actual suicide scene was filmed but removed before the film's release.

In the script version, Hurstwood returns to the dreary shelter, where he uses Carrie's money to rent a room, locks himself in, and stares at the window. The script reads, “An especially hard blast of wind rattles the window and the slip lock falls securely into place. Hurstwood closes his eyes.” Both versions—the Goetzes' script and the finished film—thus close on images of death. Wyler, unlike Dreiser, ends with Hurstwood, not Carrie. Indeed, both his independent postwar films conclude with death images: Catherine Sloper locking herself in her home, and Hurstwood exiting Carrie's dressing room to commit suicide.

Wyler completed shooting on November 2, just a few days over schedule and roughly $60,000 over budget. The film did not fare well with the critics—the
New York Times
called it “mawkish.”
²³
Its failure, however, may have been attributable in large part to the national mood: the House Un-American Activities Committee was preparing a new round of hearings for April 1951, which paralyzed Hollywood; the Cold War was at its height; America was at war with Korea; and Alger Hiss was being tried in front of Senator McCarthy's committee. Sensitive to this rancorous political climate, Paramount panicked about handling a property that was so critical of the American way of life. Wyler delivered his final cut in March 1951, but Paramount sat on it until July 1952, releasing it with no promotion. The studio heads also cut the film without Wyler's input: “I was in Rome preparing
Roman Holiday
when I got a cable from the studio as long as my arm. It said the picture would be shelved unless I agreed to cuts. They were not allowed to make the cuts without my approval, according to my contract. But faced with the prospect of having the picture shelved permanently, I decided to let them do it.”
²⁴

Paramount's handling of the film infuriated David Selznick, who sent lengthy letters to executives Frank Freeman and Barney Balaban with suggestions on how to market it, which theaters it should play in, and what film festivals it should be entered in. In one letter to Freeman he wrote, “Now I am extremely eager about ‘Carrie.' I wish I were handling it. With the combination of what I regard as the picture's superb quality, and the prestige names of Theodore Dreiser, William Wyler, Laurence Olivier, and Jennifer Jones, it would have a build-up such as few pictures have had before.”
²⁵
Paramount obviously did not share the producer's enthusiasm.

Wyler looked back on the film's failure sardonically: “The picture frightened them because of the shameful McCarthy era.
Carrie
showed American life in an unflattering light…. So we had a flop instead of a success, which I suppose was better for America.”
²⁶

Detective Story
(1951),
Roman Holiday
(1953),
The Desperate Hours
(1955),
The Children's Hour
(1961)

In September 1947, J. Parnell Thomas, a Republican congressman from New Jersey, reconvened the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to investigate “alleged subversive influence on motion pictures.” More than forty people from the film industry received subpoenas to appear before the committee. There were two groups of witnesses. One—termed “friendly” by the committee—was made up of individuals willing to name fellow workers whom they thought to be members of the Communist Party and to identify moments in films that contained communist propaganda. The second group—labeled “unfriendly”—consisted of nineteen actors, writers, producers, and directors who became, in effect, the defendants. Of these nineteen, only eleven were called to testify. One of the eleven, German playwright Bertolt Brecht, denied membership in the Communist Party and promptly left the country. The others, who became known as the “Hollywood Ten,” were eventually tried, fined, and imprisoned for contempt of Congress.

Shortly after the announcement that the HUAC would hold its first hearings in October 1947, Wyler and his friends John Huston, Philip Dunne, and Canadian actor Alexander Knox met to form a group in opposition to the hearings. At first, they called their campaign Hollywood Fights Back, but they later changed the name to the Committee for the First Amendment (CFA). The CFA gathered at Ira Gershwin's home—along with a group of Hollywood stars that included Edward G. Robinson, Danny Kaye, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Burt Lancaster, Gregory Peck, Myrna Loy, Ava Gardner, Henry Fonda, and Gene Kelly—and prepared a statement that ran a few days later in newspapers across the country and was also presented to Congress in the form of a petition. An early version of the petition, which was signed by David Selznick, John Ford, Bette Davis, George Stevens, and Frank Capra, among others, read in part:

The America we love and defend is the traditional America where men of goodwill and of different political faiths assemble in town meeting[s], discuss their political differences, and remain friends. For when the freedom to disagree, the right to dissent, is threatened in America, the whole fabric of our beloved country is endangered….

We are tired of our industry, and our professions, and of our family and friends, eternally being placed in a defensive position by every group seeking notoriety at Hollywood's expense. We have faith that the great majority of the elected Congressional representatives of the American people resent equally with us abuses of powers of the Congress.
¹

The statement that ran in newspapers was much shorter than the original three-page, single-spaced document. It read:

We, the undersigned, as American citizens who believe in constitutional democratic government, are disgusted and outraged by the continuing attempt of the House Committee on Un-American Activities to smear the Motion Picture Industry.

We hold that these hearings are morally wrong because:

Any investigation into the political beliefs of the individual is contrary to the basic principles of our democracy;

Any attempt to curb freedom of expression and to set arbitrary standards of Americanism is in itself disloyal to both the spirit and the letter of our Constitution.
²

This statement was signed by all those who had attended the meeting at Gershwin's home.

The CFA also agreed on a steering committee: director Anatole Litvak, screenwriter Julius Epstein, producer Joseph Sistrom (a conservative Republican), and David Hopkins (son of FDR friend and adviser Harry Hopkins). The CFA next decided to send a delegation to the hearings in Washington as a show of support for the unfriendly witnesses. They chartered a plane from Howard Hughes for $13,000. John Huston told the
Washington Daily News
that Hughes had no interest in politics: “It was strictly a business deal.”
³
The stars who attended this rally included many of those who had gathered at Gershwin's home and signed the petition. Wyler wanted to go but was advised against it by his doctors. Dunne and Huston joined the actors in Washington.

The night before the flight, Wyler called a meeting at Chasen's restaurant and reminded the delegates that they would likely be attacked. According to Dunne, Wyler cautioned that “if anyone aboard that plane was in the slightest degree vulnerable, our entire group and its cause could be discredited. If there is anything in any of your pasts that could hurt you or us, don't go. You don't have to tell us about it. Just don't show up at the airport tomorrow morning.”
⁴
Wyler, Dunne, and Huston were also concerned that when the CFA delegation entered the caucus room of the House Office Building, HUAC chairman Thomas might subpoena the delegates and force them to testify under oath. After some discussion, the group agreed on a plan: “If any or all of us were called to the stand and asked the question, we would reply, ‘I must respectfully decline to answer that question on the grounds that the information is privileged under the First Amendment to the Constitution.' We would then call a press conference, ask a Supreme Court justice to put us under oath…and answer all questions the newspapermen cared to ask us, including the Sixty-Four-Dollar one.”
⁵
Dunne admitted decades later that he did not like that compromise, but he thought Justice Felix Frankfurter (a friend of his father) would swear the group in on the radio, and they “would come out. But it would not be under the direct duress of the committee.”
⁶

In his autobiography, Dunne wrote that the CFA had two goals: “First, we timed our flight to support the scheduled testimony of Eric Johnston, spokesman for the Producers Association, who had publicly declared that the motion picture companies would never impose a blacklist nor submit to censorship. Second, we intended to confront Richard Nixon, the only congressman on the House Committee from our home state, and request that he either call off the hearings or insist on a reformation of its procedures.”
⁷
The CFA's plan was upended, however, when Thomas decided to bypass Johnston and call screenwriter John Howard Lawson instead. Lawson was a passionate Marxist who had come to Hollywood after establishing a reputation as a playwright and a theorist of political theater. Considered one of the Hollywood Left's most intellectual and passionate spokesmen, Lawson was aggressively brash, and his appearance set the tone for the testimony by the rest of the Hollywood Ten. Dunne considered Lawson's performance unfortunate—a setback for the cause—and felt that Lawson and others erred in not making the First Amendment the center of their defense: “An examination of what they said on the witness stand will reveal few references to the constitutional issue and an emphasis on the barren tactic that they were refusing to answer the congressmen's questions, but were trying to answer them in their own way.”
⁸
Many members of the CFA were appalled by the hostile and belligerent testimony and the subsequent negative press coverage. By the time the CFA members returned to Hollywood, their movement was riven by dissent, and they faced pressure from their agents and their colleagues to distance themselves from the Hollywood Ten and that group's opposition to the HUAC. The CFA sputtered for a little while longer but would soon dissolve. Wyler told Axel Madsen:

With our Committee for the First Amendment, we tried to defend the
principle
of the secret ballot. We tried to defend not so much the Ten as a person's right to keep his political beliefs to himself, that no one would have to disclose whether he was a Communist. We tried to stand up and defend political affiliation. I remember we did try to urge some of the Ten to disclose their political beliefs to the press, but not the Un-American Activities Committee before going to jail. I knew we were on the right side of things, but we were not able to fight the whole mood of the McCarthy era.
⁹

The CFA's attempt to confront Richard Nixon also ended in failure. Nixon had flown back to California just as the CFA delegation arrived in Washington. As Dunne recalled, “We phoned Willy Wyler…and asked him to organize a delegation and present our petition to Nixon in California. But Nixon was not to be found, either at his home or his California office, and nobody seemed to know where he was. Somehow, he had managed to disappear into thin air.”
¹⁰

During the first week of the hearings, the HUAC trotted out a horde of friendly witnesses, including Adolphe Menjou, Gary Cooper, Walt Disney, Ayn Rand, and Louis B. Mayer. To counter this opening salvo, the CFA released a radio ad entitled “They Do Not Speak for Us,” which concluded, “Listen to the real Hollywood. You will find its voice is like your own. It speaks for decency, tolerance, and democracy. It defends its own point of view and defends your right to express yours.” Other radio ads followed. In one, Frank Sinatra asked, “Once they get the movies throttled, how long will it be before the Committee goes to work on freedom of the air? How long will it be before we're told what we can and cannot say into a radio microphone?”
¹¹
In another, Gene Kelly defended Wyler's film: “Did you happen to see
The Best Years of Our Lives?
Did you like it? Were you subverted by it? Did it make you un-American? Did you come out of the movie with a desire to overthrow your government?”
¹²
Wyler himself took to the radio as well: “I wouldn't be allowed to make
The Best Years of Our Lives
today. That is directly the result of the activities of the Un-American Activities Committee. They are making decent people afraid to express their opinions…. They are creating fear in Hollywood. Fear will result in self-censorship. Self-censorship will paralyze the screen…. You will be given a diet of pictures which conform to an arbitrary diet of Americanism.”
¹³

The references to
Best Years
were prompted by a statement from Dr. John R. Leehner, the new director of the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance, declaring that Wyler's film was one of roughly a dozen named in a recent HUAC report as containing communist propaganda. This report provoked a response from Samuel Goldwyn that was covered in the press. It read in part: “There cannot be the slightest excuse for having given any currency whatever to such a fantastic ill-conceived and unworthy statement…. You could not knowingly render a greater disservice to American ideals (for whose preservation you purport to stand) and to the motion picture industry than to permit such baseless irresponsibility to be uttered about a picture which has been unanimously acclaimed as exemplifying the very best of America.”
¹⁴

Thomas suddenly ended the hearings on October 30, citing the Hollywood Ten for contempt; on November 24 the House of Representatives voted to uphold those contempt citations. On the same day, a group of motion picture executives gathered at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York; later, their spokesman Eric Johnston announced that they supported the HUAC's actions against the Hollywood Ten, who would be fired immediately and not rehired until they either were acquitted or swore under oath that they were not communists. The executives also declared, “We will not willingly employ a Communist,” but went on to state: “We are frank to recognize that such a policy involves dangers and risks. There is danger in hurting innocent people, there is the risk of creating an atmosphere of fear. We will guard against this danger, this risk, this fear.”
¹⁵
The Hollywood blacklist was now officially in place.

Wyler played an active role in this politically charged period—a fact that would cause him considerable trouble in the mid-1950s. On May 15 he hosted a party at his home for Henry Wallace, a former vice president under FDR and the Progressive Party's current presidential candidate, who championed universal health insurance and welcomed the support of the American Communist Party. The
Los Angeles Examiner
headlined a story “Wallace Talks to 12,000 after Secret Fund Raising,” which breathlessly reported: “Out of the parlors of rich leftist Hollywood society after closed door excursions into fat pocket books, Henry A. Wallace stalked back to the ‘common man' last night. Wallace was back ‘on the record' at Gilmore Field before 12,000 cheering admirers. Ended was his sojourn into ‘top secrecy' at the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel with 400 well-healed [
sic
] west-enders and later with a strictly Class A clique at the mansion of film director William Wyler.”
¹⁶

In 1948 Wyler attended a benefit at the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel to raise funds for the defense of the Hollywood Ten, and he was a sponsor of the conference for world peace held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on March 30, 1949. Later that year, he signed a brief in support of two of the Hollywood Ten: John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo. In 1950 he agreed to sponsor a petition to the New York City school authorities, calling on them to lift a ban of the
Nation
from public school libraries. He also contributed to Helen Gahagan Douglas's campaign for the U.S. Senate and wrote letters to the Federal Parole Board, asking that body to reconsider the parole applications of Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, and Samuel Ornitz (all members of the Hollywood Ten). He also wrote a special letter on behalf of Adrian Scott, stating that he “has a young son, now aged seven, who is in school but suffers from the fear he will be abandoned, and needs a parent's love and care.”
¹⁷
When Dashiell Hammett was arrested for refusing to tell a grand jury what he knew about a bail fund for four communists convicted as subversives, Wyler put up part of his bail.
¹⁸

When the HUAC hearings started in 1947, Bosley Crowther, film critic for the
New York Times
, wrote an essay entitled “Will Film-Making Be Complicated by the ‘Un-American' Probers?” Wyler replied to Crowther in a letter—undated, but probably written in 1947—in which he responded to that question: