William Wyler (8 page)

These same weaknesses would also plague
Counsellor-at-Law
, which opened two years after
Street Scene
and shared its interest in presenting a variety of ethnic characters. Unlike its predecessor, this play takes place indoors rather than outside a tenement building. Reflecting Rice's experience as a lawyer,
Counsellor
unfolds in the law offices of Simon and Tedesco, utilizing the firm's waiting room to showcase the variety of social and ethnic types who pass through the office. Rice also throws in references to the Depression, including mention of a businessman jumping off a roof and of a communist agitator who is beaten by the police.

Unlike
Street Scene
—which, as the title implies, is about the interplay of characters in a New York City neighborhood—
Counsellor-at-Law
focuses on a bona fide protagonist: George Simon, a high-powered Jewish lawyer. The plot is fueled by his relationships with his high-society WASP wife, his Italian American partner, and the various clients, rich and poor, who come to see him. But as a social drama, the play remains superficial. Rice portrays Simon as a heroic figure who rises above his immigrant origins to become one of New York's most powerful lawyers. He overcharges the rich to get them out of their foolish scrapes but dispenses free legal advice to the poor, especially people from his old neighborhood. He is married to a socially prominent woman whom he blindly worships but who is condescending to him. Her children from her first marriage actively despise him and refuse to consider him their father. Through this relationship, Rice introduces anti-Semitism more obliquely than he did in
Street Scene
, implying here that Simon's wife and her children reject him because of his Jewishness. This implication becomes more explicit in the depiction of Simon's mother as a caricature of the doting Jewish mother who regularly visits her successful son at his office. The scene between Simon's wife and his mother is one of Rice's best as he highlights their social and ethnic differences and the wife's dismissive and barely tolerant attitude toward her mother-in-law.

Again, however, Rice fails to develop or examine his observations about these ethnic and social divides. Although Simon is depicted as savvy and sharp, he remains oddly obtuse when it comes to his wife. She refuses to support him when he is threatened with disbarment over an impropriety in an old case—discovered by a rival blue-blood lawyer who also resents his Jewishness. She elects instead to go on a cruise with a lover from her own social circle. The play concludes as Simon attempts to jump out the office window but is saved at the last minute by his devoted secretary who not-so-secretly loves him. Once again, a serious issue is undercut by a melodramatic conclusion.

Rice handles the issue of the communist sympathizer in the same way. Harry Becker, the son of a friend from the old neighborhood, has been beaten and then arrested for making speeches on the street. When Simon confronts him, Becker accuses the lawyer of being “a traitor to his class.” He goes on to say, “How did you get where you are?…By betraying your own class…. By climbing on the backs of the working class…. Getting in right with crooked bourgeois politicians and pimping for corporations.”
¹³
Simon clearly feels there is some truth in Becker's remarks, but all he can do is threaten to hit him. Rice resolves the scene with an interruption, and the issue is not raised again, as Becker later dies of his injuries.

Counsellor-at-Law
ultimately does not succeed as a social play because Rice's progressive instincts yield to those of the commercial showman. The spectacle of Simon's world, the potential scandal, the love story, and the excitement of the multiple stories that crowd the play take precedence over any serious consideration of the issues introduced in the plot. Once again, Rice proves to be a remarkable storyteller with a keen ability to juggle multiple plotlines and a talent for evoking character types with broad strokes. George Simon is a potentially compelling and dynamic character, but he, like the play itself, lacks the depth and complexity to generate significant drama. Dancing around the important questions raised, Rice's melodramatic approach so deeply implicates his protagonist in the corrupt, cynical world around him that the play ultimately glorifies that world, rendering it as an exciting, pulsating locale.

Counsellor
was a Broadway success. It did so well, in fact, that a road company production opened in Chicago while the play was still running in New York; it also played in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Universal paid the rather exorbitant sum of $150,000 for the rights to that play and to Rice's
The Left Bank
. The deal included Rice's services as screenwriter.

The studio wanted Paul Muni, who had played Simon on Broadway, to reprise the role in the film, but he refused; Muni wanted to avoid being typecast as a Jew. Instead, he would make his film debut playing Tony Camonte in
Scarface
. Samuel Goldwyn, who would soon hire Wyler to direct for his company, famously remarked, “You can't have a Jew playing a Jew; it wouldn't work on screen.”
¹⁴
Other actors considered for the part were Edward G. Robinson, Otto Kruger (who starred in the Chicago production), William Powell, and Warner Baxter. The name at the top of the studio's list was John Barrymore—seemingly an odd choice to play a Jewish lawyer from the ghetto—but the younger Laemmle wanted him, despite his hefty fee of $25,000 a week and his reputation for heavy drinking. Even Rice was “delighted to hear that Barrymore is in the cast.”
¹⁵
Thirty years later, however, Rice confessed in his autobiography that he “had doubts about his rightness for the part; moreover, he was definitely on the decline.”
¹⁶

Viewing the chance to direct an actor of Barrymore's stature as a great opportunity, Wyler did not object either. Barrymore was also pleased to be working with Wyler. When they met, the actor put his arm around the director, declaring, “You and I are going to get along fine, you know. Don't worry about all that temperamental stuff you've heard about the Barrymores. It all comes from my sister and she's full of shit.”
¹⁷
Moreover, Barrymore assured Wyler that he was happy to work with him, explaining, “Because you're Jewish you'll be able to help me a great deal with the character.”
¹⁸

Hoping to get an early start on the screenplay, Universal sent Wyler to Mexico City to meet with Rice, who was vacationing there with his family. Because the trip would take three days by train, Wyler flew from Juarez on the first Mexican airline; he was the only passenger. And when the plane was forced to land in Leon because of bad weather in Mexico City, he found himself stranded there for three days: “Well, there I was stuck in a crummy hotel full of cockroaches in this town where no one spoke English.”
¹⁹
Roaming around the airport, and anxious to get to his destination, Wyler spotted a Mexican worker with bandaged eyes who needed to get to the capital for surgery. He persuaded the pilot that they had to leave immediately or the worker's blindness would be on his conscience. When he finally arrived in Mexico City, however, Rice informed him that he would not discuss business while on vacation, so Wyler spent a few days sightseeing by himself.

Because Rice wanted to fill out the cast with actors from the New York production, Wyler tested a number of them but ended up using only four in the film. For the part of Harry Becker, the communist agitator, he chose Vincent Sherman, who had played the role in the Chicago production and later became a noted film director himself (
The Hard Way, Mr. Skeffington
). Two other future directors, Bobby Gordon and Richard Quine, also had bit parts. But Wyler opted to cast Hollywood actors for the important supporting roles: Bebe Daniels as Simon's loyal secretary, and Doris Kenyon as his wife. He had some trouble casting Roy Darwin, Mrs. Simon's lover. The studio wanted Sidney Blackmer, but Wyler was “strongly opposed,” explaining in a memo to Laemmle: “casting a man without sex appeal or distinct personality of any kind in the part of Roy Darwin will prove greater harm than you may realize.”
²⁰
Wyler got his way, and Melvyn Douglas got the part.

The shooting schedule was set for twenty days. Having signed Barrymore for just two weeks at $25,000 a week, the studio instructed Wyler to shoot all the scenes with Barrymore as quickly as possible and not to stop for close-ups of anyone else—those bits could be done later. “It was mad,” Wyler later noted. “In every scene, I shot only Barrymore, skipping close-ups of anybody talking to him for later. It's a terrible way to make a picture.”
²¹
As it turned out, even with this feverish method, the picture took three and a half weeks to complete, largely because of Barrymore's inability to remember his lines.

The actor complained that his part “was longer than the Old Testament,”
²²
and the lines had to be delivered at lightning speed. A studio log noted at least four substantial delays, some lasting half a day, because of “Mr. Barrymore not knowing his lines.”
²³
Vincent Sherman told Jan Herman (Wyler's biographer) that his roommate John Qualen, who had a small part in the film, had been delayed for a dinner appointment because Wyler had to do fifty-six takes of a scene with Barrymore. These memory lapses got so bad that Barrymore's lines sometimes had to be printed on cue cards that were held up by a script girl riding on a dolly. Wyler noted, “Sometimes we had to write on the walls for him or on a piece of the ceiling.”
²⁴
Sherman also reported that Barrymore's face looked so puffy that the makeup department had to tape up his jowls with fish skins before he could go in front of the camera.
²⁵

Throughout this struggle with the aging actor, Wyler was getting memos from Laemmle telling him to keep up the pace, as well as constant threats that he would be fired if the film was not finished on time. Wyler responded by employing rough tactics on the set, particularly with the supporting players. Freda Rosenblatt, Wyler's assistant, reported, “Willy wore everyone down on the set…. The actors were ready to kill him.”
²⁶

Barrymore tried to impress Wyler with his Jewish gestures. While preparing for an early scene in which Simon is at his desk, talking on the phone, Barrymore asked Wyler if he had any suggestions. “No,” said Wyler. “Pick up the phone and talk.” Though Barrymore played the scene well, he added an odd gesture when he picked up the phone, which, he explained to Wyler, was meant to be Jewish. Wyler replied that Simon was a modern, successful man who would pick up the phone like everyone else. Barrymore was unhappy at this correction, and he had to be reined in on other occasions when Wyler thought he was being too ethnic.
²⁷

Counsellor-at-Law
was the first important American play that Wyler transferred to the screen. (There would be twelve more such adaptations—counting his two versions of
The Children's Hour
. One could argue, of course, that none of these plays has stood the test of time—only
The Little Foxes
has had important revivals—but in their day, both the plays and the playwrights were important figures on the American cultural landscape.) This film (and many of the adaptations that followed) shows that Wyler had few peers when it came to faithfully transferring a play to the screen without artificially opening it up and introducing exterior scenes. His preferred approach was to exploit cinematic space primarily through editing and fluid camera work. For instance, all the action in Rice's play takes place over a week's time, either in the law firm's waiting room or in George Simon's office, and Wyler showed his independent streak by resisting the demands of Laemmle and studio manager Henry Henigson that he expand this limited space. Instead, he maintains the interior structure but adds several other locales to Rice's two settings: the building's lobby, where individuals get on and off the elevators, and the offices of John Tedesco, Simon's secretary Regina (Rexy) Gordon, and Herbert Weinberg, a young attorney. Wyler's camera moves rapidly through these various spaces, matching the frenetic pace of the protagonist's typical workday. “I wanted to retain the construction of the play and at the same time have movement,” Wyler explained. “It was only an illusion; we never left the lawyer's offices.”
²⁸
This is not completely true, as the action does move out into the lobby on numerous occasions, but as Wyler observed, “No critic ever wrote that it was just a photographed stage play. I avoided that feeling by using several offices…or by having the actors walk or move around at certain moments.”
²⁹

The film opens with its only exterior shot, a low-angle view of the Empire State Building. The camera slowly moves up the structure, emphasizing its grandeur as a monument to American ingenuity and enterprise.
Counsellor-at-Law
was released in 1933, at the nadir of the Great Depression. More than 5,000 banks had closed, and the nation's industry and agriculture were in shambles. No one was predicting a return to prosperity. But Franklin Roosevelt had been inaugurated nine months before the release of Wyler's film, and his ideas for reviving the American economy were beginning to take hold during its preparation and filming. Like the opening shot, the film reflects Wyler's optimism about the direction of the new administration, which was marked by a commitment to balance. In the words of historian Richard H. Pells, “The New Dealers were especially disturbed by the
chaos
of private capitalism; in their view, American life needed a greater sense of order and control if the nation was to survive the depression.” They also wanted to promote harmony among all social classes without destroying the free-enterprise system. “They believed that government, business, and labor should all subordinate their internal differences to the common welfare.”
³⁰
Wyler uses Rice's protagonist to illustrate some of the tensions and difficulties inherent in achieving that kind of political and social transition.