William Wyler (7 page)

When he finally reaches the town, the inhabitants are gathered in church, singing “Silent Night” and celebrating Christmas. Wyler cuts to a long shot of Sangster walking up the street, back to the interior of the church, then back again to Sangster, tracking him slowly as he staggers toward the church. Wyler films Sangster framed through the windows of the bank as he moves past it. Finally making it into the church, he dies with his godson in his arms, surrounded by the congregants. Without any fanfare, Bob Sangster, the most selfish of the three godfathers, is thus redeemed through his sacrifice—as the other two have already been redeemed by giving up their lives to ensure the baby's deliverance.

Peter Kyne hated Wyler's grim version of his sentimental, religious story. In a letter to screenwriter Tom Reed, he proclaimed, “Frankly, I think your Mr. Wyler murdered our beautiful story…. It was dreadfully directed and dreadfully played by that leading man…. I don't care how much money the picture makes, my conscience will not let me cheer for the atrocious murder of one of the few works of art I have ever turned out.”
¹⁰

The film did indeed make money, grossing $18,000 during its first week in New York. It also did well in other parts of the country and in Europe. Most important, it established Wyler as an important director. Universal offered him a new contract at $750 per week; this was supposed to jump to $1,000 the following year, but because economic conditions at the studio were bad in 1932, Wyler was ultimately forced to compromise on his salary, which leveled out at $850 per week.

Seeking another quality property to direct after
Hell's Heroes
, Wyler tried to interest Junior in
The Road Back
, the sequel to the studio's highly successful adaptation of
All Quiet on the Western Front
, but Junior was hesitant to commit. Finally, Robert Wyler found the story that would become his brother's next film. A
House Divided
was adapted from Olive Eden's magazine story “Heart and Hand” (the original title for the film as well) by John Clymer (
The Love Trap
) and Dale Van Every, with some additional dialogue by John Huston. Most likely inspired by Eugene O'Neill's
Desire under the Elms
, it is the story of a middle-aged fisherman, Seth Law, who sends for a mail-order bride after his wife's death. He is expecting a sturdy, hardworking woman named Ada, but the petite and pretty Ruth Evans arrives instead, because Ada has already married. Initially, Seth rejects Ruth as being too frail, but during their first dinner together, he decides to marry her after all. The marriage worsens the already tense relationship between Seth and his son Matt, who hates both his father and the fisherman's life that has been imposed on him. When Matt tries to protect Ruth from his father, the two men fight, and Seth is seriously injured in a fall from the staircase. During his lengthy recuperation, Ruth and Matt fall in love. Suspecting that his wife loves his son, Seth crawls upstairs one night and challenges Matt to a fight. Ruth, terrified, runs to the pier and hides on a boat. Refusing to strike his father, Matt goes to find Ruth, only to discover that a storm has dislodged the boat from the pier, and Ruth has been carried out to sea. Father and son head out to save Ruth, catching up to her just as her boat is approaching some dangerous rocks. Seth ties a rope around himself, providing a lifeline for Matt to reach Ruth. As the young couple reach the safety of the shore, they discover that Seth's boat has capsized, and he has drowned. The film ends with Matt and Ruth looking out to sea.

The film stars Walter Huston, who gives a complex and sympathetic performance as the gruff, unsympathetic Seth. In this early sound film, Huston has no difficulty transitioning to the new medium. Matt is played by Kent Douglass, and Ruth by Helen Chandler, who was also the love interest of Bela Lugosi in
Dracula
that same year. During production, Wyler again taxed Junior's patience, as the film ran ten days over schedule and $53,000 over budget, bringing its total cost to $284,000.

Wyler also had problems with the script, which was originally written as a silent film. Just before filming began, Jack Clymer was asked to transform the script into a talkie, which he managed to accomplish in two and a half weeks, although Wyler was left with a script that had plenty of gaps. As a result, he improvised a great deal on the set, ultimately adding almost 100 scenes to the 332 in Clymer's script. Junior blamed Wyler for the overruns, ranting, “You do not have to shoot every scene from three different angles. Confine yourself to the shots necessary to cover the action.”
¹¹
Less than a week later, he admonished Wyler again: “For your information, permission for retakes must be given by me and I don't want this to ever happen again.”
¹²

Unlike
Hell's Heroes
, which is almost wholly an outdoor film,
A House Divided
emphasizes confined indoor settings and shifting spatial relationships between characters and sets, providing multiple examples of the director's emerging preference for composition in depth. As in
Hell's Heroes
, where—much to Kyne's displeasure—Wyler largely eliminated the story's religious and sentimental overtones, his visual arrangements here enforce an emotional distance from a story that is at heart melodramatic.

This film, too, opens with a shot of nature—this time featuring the sea, the mountains, and the coastline between them. In the middle distance, a rowboat has just settled on the beach. Soon we see some men, including Seth Law, untying a coffin from the boat. (Always deliberate in his visual details, Wyler ends the film with a corresponding image of Seth tying himself to a rowboat to save his wife and son—an act that leads to his death, the boat becoming his coffin.) Seth, his son Matt, and others then proceed toward a cemetery. Like its predecessor, this film begins with a scene of death, although here it is literal rather than symbolic. During the procession, Wyler cuts to another in-depth long shot, casting the diminished figures in shadow even as they are dwarfed by the mountains and the sea. As the minister concludes the service and the mourners file away, Wyler draws attention to the sound of the earth hitting the coffin, and this mundane detail further undercuts the sentimentality of the scene, while adding to Matt's grief and pain over the death of his mother. Seth, a hard man, is unaffected by the funeral. Like O'Neill's Ephraim Cabot (also played by Walter Huston in the Broadway premiere of
Desire under the Elms)
, he has a cold, indifferent nature. Later, after taking his emotional son to a bar and forcing him to drink, Seth fights with Matt, knocks him out, and carries him home.

On the day Ruth arrives, Seth refuses to meet her, so Matt does so instead. Wyler's handling of their meeting is an introduction to his mature style: the sequence opens with a shot of the sitting room, featuring a staircase that will figure prominently in the rest of the film. Matt dashes down the stairs to answer the door and is startled to see Ruth, who is framed in the doorway. Most of their ensuing dialogue is filmed in two-shots; Wyler cuts away to Ruth only twice, and Matt never appears in the frame alone. This minimal cutting preserves the sense of their coming together—something that is never established in the scenes between father and son. Matt then shows her around, and Ruth takes to the water immediately, declaring, “I always knew I'd love the ocean.” The scene ends with them standing by the water; it then dissolves to a high-angle shot of the front of Seth's boat as it enters the harbor, dominating the space as if to mock Ruth's dreams.

Returning home after a day of fishing and meeting Ruth for the first time, Seth immediately rejects her as a wife. In the frames that make up this sequence, Wyler maintains his earlier strategy of fixing his attention on Matt and Ruth in two-shots, with minimal cutting. Seth, in contrast, is usually pictured alone. When he belatedly decides to propose during dinner, Ruth seems ambivalent, and while she is drying the dishes with Matt, Wyler returns to his two-shot framing. Seth then enters, framed by the doorway in deep focus, and announces that the marriage will be celebrated that very night. Matt leaves to make the arrangements, and Seth moves to the front of the frame, taking Matt's place beside Ruth. All this significant movement is conveyed in a single take without a cut—clearly presaging Wyler's mature style and demonstrating that as early as 1931, he was experimenting with the technique of filming significant action in segments whose duration and staging exceeded the reach of the standard shot.

When Seth and Ruth return home after the wedding, Wyler shoots them at opposite ends of the room, emphasizing the distance between them. Seth walks slowly toward her, while Ruth, her back to him, looks toward the window; she begs to get out of the marriage, but Seth insists that all will be well. The mood becomes further strained when Matt enters and Wyler cuts to a triangular three-shot with Matt in the center—another type of framing he will come to favor when emphasizing the inherent tension in a given situation. Seth sends Ruth upstairs. Matt then stands at the foot of the staircase, pleading with his father to give Ruth time, but Seth tells his son to leave and says that perhaps Ruth will give him a real son. Seth then ascends the stairs, and Wyler cuts to a frontal shot of him that practically fills the frame—a composition he will use again in
The Heiress
. When Matt tries to stop him, a fight ensues on the landing, and Seth falls to the ground floor, unconscious. (As in
The Little Foxes
, Wyler uses the staircase here as an area where the characters negotiate power.) Unlike the scene in the bar after the funeral, Matt defeats his father this time, and Wyler emphasizes this power shift in the last shot of the sequence by framing Seth's face in the space between the staircase railings.

In the final confrontational sequence, a storm rages outside as Seth, lying in a bed downstairs, asks Ruth to massage his legs. While she does so, Seth tries to woo her, showing great tenderness and sensitivity—here, Huston demonstrates his range by making the character sympathetic and multidimensional. However, this compassionate moment is interrupted by Matt, and Wyler cuts to another triangular shot with the son in the middle. Soon Matt and Ruth ascend the stairs, leaving Seth (still not fully recovered from his fall) on his downstairs bed. In a low-angle shot, Seth watches as Matt, now framed by the railings, bids goodnight to Ruth—the son has clearly triumphed. Wyler builds sexual tension in this sequence as he cuts between the principals, with the sounds of the storm in the background—a scene the writers clearly lifted from
Desire under the Elms
, when Eben declares his love for Abbie. As Seth writhes on his bed, Ruth paces the room upstairs, her pent-up anxiety symbolized by the pelting rain against the window that frames her. These shots are intercut with images of Matt, who is also pacing and also goes to the window, opening it and letting the rain wash over his face—an expressive shot that Wyler would repeat in
Wuthering Heights
.

As Ruth finally enters Matt's room, Wyler cuts to the scene downstairs. In a shot composed in depth, with the railing in the foreground and Seth sitting up in the background, he initiates the final confrontation between father and son. Seth slinks toward the staircase like some primordial sea creature that emerged from the ocean at the beginning of time. As he clutches the railings, his face is framed by them, expressing both his desire and his hatred of the son and rival who has reduced him to this state of bestial impotence. He struggles up the stairs, catches the lovers together, and vows to kill Matt. Matt refuses to fight his crippled father, but there is a scuffle; Matt falls down the stairs but recovers and goes after Ruth, who has fled into the storm.

Wyler concludes the film with father and son trying to rescue Ruth, and Seth dying in the process. Like
Hell's Heroes
, this film ends with the death of its most compelling character. The final image is a brief shot of Matt and Ruth looking out to sea. Although there are a few other characters in the film, and the fishing village is depicted effectively, Wyler makes this tragic story convincing through his obsessive concentration on the three principals. Nothing matters beyond their struggle in an enclosed space, which allows him to experiment with the framings that would invest the story with visual and geometric tension. Throughout his career as a director, Wyler would thrive in the studio setting with properties, often originating on the stage, that were limited and confining, thus pushing him to experiment further with depth-of-field staging, which tested the limits of the shot's visual richness.

Counsellor-at-Law
(1933)

The experience of directing A
House Divided
whetted Wyler's appetite for more serious projects. That desire was also fueled by John Huston, with whom Wyler formed a lifelong friendship. (Huston once commented that he considered Wyler his best friend in the industry.) Huston, who had lived among the poor in Mexico, convinced Wyler to try a socially conscious film. Hoping to develop a story about the millions of Americans who had been dispossessed and left jobless by the Depression, the two men decided to live among the poor and the homeless to find material for their film. “To know what it was to be a bum, we both took ten cents with us, went downtown in old clothes…. We got a lousy free dinner in a mission after we listened to a spiel and signed statements to the effect that we had come to Christ. Then we spent the night in a flophouse. Ten cents it cost.”
¹

That experience produced no script, but Huston and Wyler did collaborate on a screenplay based on a property called “Steel,” which Universal had owned for some time. After reading their script, Carl Laemmle Jr. was interested in producing the film, but the project was eventually shelved. The pair was not idle for long, however. Universal had bought the rights to Oliver La Farge's 1929 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
Laughing Boy
. Working on that script would occupy Wyler and Huston for much of 1932.

Laughing Boy
focuses on the clash between mainstream American culture and that of the Native American peoples of the Southwest. La Farge, who was also an anthropologist, utilized material from his frequent archaeological and sociological expeditions to the region. His novel deals with poverty and the spiritual alienation of Native Americans, as well as prostitution and racism.

Wyler believed that he could turn this story into an epic film foregrounded by a compelling love story, even though Laughing Boy's love interest, Slim Girl, works for a time as a prostitute for white men. By way of research, Wyler and Huston made multiple trips to Arizona, where they camped out with the Navajo. They also traveled to Oklahoma City and Lawrence, Kansas, to watch sacred dances and confer with medicine men on the reservations of the Hopi, Comanche, Crow, and Blackfoot. In his autobiography, Huston wrote of sitting “all day long in a Hogan watching a sand painting being made.”
²

Wyler was also in contact with La Farge, who helped by authenticating the details of the script. In a letter written in 1932, Wyler asks him for more color sketches of gods and goddesses and for sketches he can use “for costuming for any or all characters at different stages of the story.” He even asks for pictures of blankets “at different stages of weaving.”
³

The project was eventually shelved by Universal, primarily because of problems related to casting the leads. Huston had proposed making the film with real Indians—Mexicans or American Indians—”but even Willy thought that was too wild a notion.”
⁴
In a letter to La Farge, Wyler did not specify why the studio had halted production, merely reporting that the film was “indefinitely shelved or postponed.” He went on to write, “I have tried, although unsuccessfully, to interest another studio in the purchase of the book and script, which I understand Universal is willing to sell, and I hope to be able to accomplish this—if not now perhaps later this year, because I don't think
Laughing Boy
should remain unproduced.”
⁵
Universal eventually sold the rights to Metro as a vehicle for Ramon Novarro, but Huston dismissed the film as “wretched and vulgar.”
⁶

Wyler and Huston next worked on a script based on Daniel Ahearn's story “The Wild Boys of the Road.” Like the original, their script, titled “Forgotten Boy,” was about children who had run away from home during the Depression because their parents could not support them. Many of them rode the rails, crossing state lines. In some states, officials refused to allow these children to get off the trains, and when a dozen of them died from starvation and thirst in a Texas boxcar, it caused a national scandal. Wyler and Huston traveled around California, talking to brakemen, hobos, and kids. Wyler also had a reader from the studio search for stories in the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
about children caught committing crimes, and he attended night sessions of juvenile court.

Huston recalled the script's final scene, involving two boys who had tried to rob a pawnshop: “One of them had been seriously wounded—dying—and the other held a menacing crowd at bay with a gun in his hand. Standing over his dying friend, he shouted to the crowd, ‘You killed him!' The camera then came around so the kid was pointing the gun into the audience, with the accusation, ‘You killed him!'”
⁷
The film was never made because, according to Huston, as it was being prepared for production, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's new administration promptly put these runaways to work in the reforestation program of the Civilian Conservation Corps.

In 1932, Wyler directed a film for Universal,
Tom Brown of Culver
, about a rebellious boy attending a military academy and his relationships with various friends. Although this material had already been filmed, and the protagonist's character type was based on the nineteenth-century British story “Tom Brown's School Days,” Wyler researched the project with the same thoroughness he had devoted to the two unrealized scripts co-written with Huston. While spending two weeks living in a barracks at a military school, he heard that upperclassmen terrorized the freshmen and wanted to witness this practice firsthand. “So one day I got a couple of older boys to hide me in a closet,” he recalled, and he watched as naked plebes got “slapped around for no reason.”
⁸
He included such a scene in the film, but the superintendent of the school, who had final script approval, insisted that it be removed. Nonetheless, Wyler was proud that he had filmed the project on location—a rarity in those days.

Tom Brown of Culver
is a pedestrian effort. Wyler gives the film a light touch, emphasizing the camaraderie among Tom and his friends. The more serious subplot—in which Tom discovers that his father, a decorated war hero supposedly killed in action, is really alive—is handled melodramatically. The father ultimately admits that he was really a deserter and runs away again, but Tom finds him and prevents him from committing suicide. Tom then resolves to leave school and stay with his father. As he prepares to do so, however, the father joyously informs his son that he has been exonerated and his Medal of Honor reinstated. The film concludes with Tom proudly pinning the medal on his father and then returning to Culver to complete his studies.

Wyler left Universal briefly in January 1933 because of the studio's failure to make good on its agreement to let his brother Robert direct a film. Wyler was distraught over his desertion of the studio because he felt he owed an enormous debt to Carl Laemmle. Although Laemmle was no longer involved in the day-to-day operation of the studio—which had been taken over by his son—Wyler wrote a heartfelt letter to his old mentor, declaring, “Even though I will no longer be connected with Universal I do not regard my indebtedness to you as being at an end. I will never be able to repay you for your many kindnesses.”
⁹

Despite his increased stature in the industry, Wyler was unable to find work. (He even tried to sell the script of
Laughing Boy
to Paramount when he heard that Universal was willing to unload it.) Frustrated and confused, he returned to Universal a month later, signing a one-picture, $8,000 deal to direct
Her First Mate
, the third in a series of four comedies starring ZaSu Pitts and her husband, Slim Summerville. Based on a Broadway play called
Salt Water
, it is a tired film that is not very funny and quite devoid of comic energy. Speaking to his biographer about this sorry project years later, Wyler made the best of it: “There were little pieces of business that were sort of advanced for their time. The wife claims she's pregnant, then her husband discovers she is not but still uses the stratagem.”
¹⁰

Wyler, however, was just biding his time.
Her First Mate
marked the end of his apprentice period, and soon thereafter he signed a new contract with Universal for $1,125 a week. His next assignment was Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Elmer Rice's
Counsellor-at-Law
. With that film, Wyler would declare himself one of Hollywood's major directors and initiate an extraordinarily rich and productive phase of his career.

Wyler's association with Rice is a fascinating example of the coming together of two artists whose careers have been perceived in similar ways, although today, Wyler is the more famous of the two. Both men were of German origin. Wyler was born in Mulhouse, France, but the town was under German control at the time, and his mother's family was German-Jewish. When he started to attain success in motion pictures, he changed his name from Willy to the more formal William, which he thought would look more imposing on the screen. Rice, ten years older than Wyler, was born in America to German-Jewish parents. Like a true American, he rejected his ancestral past and proclaimed that his identity began with his grandparents' arrival in America. This New World sensibility also motivated his name change from Elmer Leopold Reisenstein: “I saw no reason for hanging on to a foreign-looking name with which I had no associations or emotional ties.”
¹¹

Both men started out in the business world. Wyler was sent to business school in Switzerland to prepare to take over his father's haberdashery, while Rice started as a claims clerk and later put himself through law school. He then rejected both business and the law to become a writer. Likewise, Wyler felt himself unsuited for business and his father's way of life and moved to America to work for his cousin Carl Laemmle in the movies. The most important similarity between the two, however, was their artistic versatility. Rice became an accomplished playwright who successfully utilized a variety of forms. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he seemed equally at home with such divergent styles as expressionism, naturalism, melodrama, and farce. Similarly, Wyler has confounded critics because of his determination to try everything. Not settling for any particular genre, he achieved equal success with intimate character studies, epics, musicals, social films, and melodramas.

Rice was a critic of the Broadway theater, and his concerns seem applicable to Wyler's work in Hollywood as well. Writing in the 1930s, he questioned whether American drama as represented on Broadway could claim to be serious art or whether economic exigencies rendered it merely commercial and thus subliterary. This conflict of art and commerce has been cited numerous times in the decades since, and it has often been used by critics to undercut Hollywood directors. That Rice raised this question is interesting in itself, since his own career is marked by startling inconsistency. Like his literary idols Ibsen and Shaw, Rice wanted to write socially significant drama, and some of his work is still performed and anthologized today, particularly
The Adding Machine
and
Street Scene
, but also the lesser-known
The Subway
and
We the People
. However, like other American playwrights, Rice also craved Broadway hits, turning out dross such as
Cock Robin
and
The Grand Tour
. The artist and critic who hectored the commercial theater was also addicted to it.

Rice's first play,
On Trial
(1914), was an enormous success. The playwright successfully exploited the rarely used flashback technique to tell the story of the rape of an innocent girl who is on trial for murder. The search for the real murderer moves the trial plot forward, while the story of her rape is told in flashback. The play was such a sensation that during the second intermission on opening night, George M. Cohan offered Rice $30,000 for the rights to the play, but Rice, suspecting a prank, turned him down. Although he eventually made $100,000 from
On Trial
, Rice dismissed his work as nothing more than “a gimmick.” And as a student of playwrights such as Shakespeare, Galsworthy, and Shaw, he wrote, “I could not understand all of this acclaim.”
¹²

Street Scene
(1929), which anticipates the structure of
Counsellor-at-Law
, is a useful guide to Rice's strengths and weaknesses as a playwright. Like the later play, it interweaves a number of plots and introduces a large cast of characters. Most of the incidents are short, building interest and anticipation; Rice shows himself to be adept at altering mood and tempo. He also introduces an array of ethnic types representing melting-pot New York, although by modern standards, most of these characters seem rather broad and stereotypical. It is interesting, since Rice was Jewish, that no character is as unattractive as the Jewish socialist Abraham Kaplan, who is described as “hook nosed with horn rimmed spectacles.” Kaplan's accent is exaggerated, as Rice seems to relish stretching out every syllable and word. Also, although Rice empathized with socialism, his was an idealistic rather than a practical position; he never joined the party and did not care for political squabbles. Nor does he shy away from revealing the anti-Semitism of the other characters. Kaplan is regularly referred to as a “kike” by others, and some of the neighbors are appalled by the relationship between Kaplan's son, Sam, and the Irishwoman Shirley Maurrant. Even Sam's sister tells Shirley that she disapproves of intermarriage.
Street Scene
is tinged with politics and social commentary, but every time Rice raises an important issue, he quickly diffuses the controversy by resorting to melodrama. The play itself revolves around a melodramatic plot involving Anna Maurrant's love affair, which is discovered by her husband, who then murders his wife and her lover. The issues of poverty, the failure of capitalism, anti-Semitism, and violence are all blurred by the mechanics of the plot and the cartoonish nature of some of the characters, few of whom experience any moments of introspection.