In his study of the classic Hollywood film, David Bordwell highlights the scene in which Baby Face and his partner plot to kidnap the son of a wealthy tenant in the nearby high-rise. As the two gangsters sit talking in a restaurant near the window, Wyler shows a mother wheeling a baby carriage outside, framed by the window but somewhat out of focus. Bordwell notes that even though she is not the subject of the conversation, “the fact that she occupies frame center…gives her symbolic significance.”7 Later, when the kidnapping plan becomes problematic because of Baby Face's attempt to kill Dave, Wyler shows the two gangsters foregrounded by the pier but expressionistically barred by its shadows; once again, a woman wheels a baby carriage in the background—this time in focus.
Several interior scenes in Wuthering Heights (1939) display Wyler's mastery of composing in depth. As Heathcliff, returned from his travels, arrives to confront Cathy and her new husband in their elegant home, Wyler films his progress from the front door into the living area, where the Lintons are seated. He repeats this movement through space when Heathcliff leaves, emphasizing the stylish living space of the room while also highlighting the “space” that now separates Heathcliff from Cathy. Wyler's camera work manages to seem extravagant and controlled at the same time. When Heathcliff later attends a dance at the Lintons’ home, Wyler begins the sequence by double-framing the initial view of the dance, which is seen through the doorway and then reflected in a mirror, thus constricting the space and suggesting that Cathy's choice of money and social status has compromised her. As he did in Jezebel the year before, Wyler utilizes the room's ornate columns to confine the guests, even as they seem to glide through space; he also cuts to a shot from behind the orchestra, taking in the whole room, the elaborate architecture, and the elegantly dressed partygoers.
A master at exploring repressed emotions, Wyler loved to employ the settings of spacious older homes, where he could exploit the linear effects of their staircases, columns, arches, and doorways to frame his shots. These formal houses, with their visually spacious but dramatically confined interiors, were perfect stages for Wyler to visualize human confrontation. They are used to impressive effect in These Three, Jezebel, Wuthering Heights, The Little Foxes, The Heiress, Carrie, The Big Country, Ben-Hur, and The Collector. Of all the structural features of these houses, Wyler was most fond of staircases, using them as loci for the emotional struggles that dominate his narratives. Although they rarely lead anywhere in particular, staircases often figure in his compositions as vertical planes on which characters can be arranged in commanding or authoritative positions—or in subordinate ones, with one character subjected to another's will.
In The Little Foxes, Horace waits for his wife at the top of the stairs. When she arrives, Wyler's camera seems to place Horace in a position of authority as he chastises Regina about her underhanded business dealings. But Regina climbs the stairs during the scene and confronts her husband at the top, seizing the power and demeaning him in the process. Later, when Horace is upstairs dying, Regina's brothers gather at the foot of the stairs to await news of his condition. Regina descends the staircase and speaks to them from one of the intermediate steps, demonstrating her power over them in the struggle for control of the family business. After Horace's death, Regina attempts to blackmail her brothers with her knowledge of their theft of her husband's bonds. During this conversation, Wyler shows Regina's daughter Alexandra, in deep focus, slowly descending the stairs as her mother did earlier. She overhears what Regina is saying, and the venality of her family becomes clear to her. At the end of the film, when Alexandra breaks with her mother, Regina's position on the stairs seems diminished as Wyler magnifies her daughter's stinging rejection. Once Alexandra has gone, Regina mounts the stairs alone, and ironically, her ascent is now more that of a victim than a victor.
Wyler echoes this less than triumphant retreat upstairs in The Heiress. In the opening sequence, Catherine Sloper is seen descending the staircase, where she stops to greet the maid who is carrying the party dress Catherine will later be wearing when she meets Morris Townsend. Wyler catches her hopeful reflection as she pauses in front of a mirror. But in the film's final movement, after Catherine has exacted her revenge on Morris, she is seen climbing the stairs with a hardened expression—satisfied by her actions, but now doomed in Wyler's framing to life as a prisoner in her own house.
While Bazin's judgment that Wyler's deep focus “aims at perfect neutrality” is not accurate—in fact, it seems clear that the director deliberately organizes his frames to evoke specific responses—both Wyler's style and his attention to detail do support Bazin's assertion that Wyler is a realist. Among the numerous examples of his dedication to verisimilitude, a few stand out: the bill for the dresses and gowns worn in Jezebel came to $30,000, the furniture and props for the dinner scene were all period antiques, and the bar was a copy of the famous St. Louis Bar in New Orleans; for The Little Foxes, Wyler commissioned a research book with sections on cotton, agriculture, popular books of the time (1902), music, hotel prices, historical background, and so on; the arena for the chariot race in Ben-Hur covered more than eighteen acres, with 1,500-foot straightaways alongside a central spina, flanked by four statues standing 30 feet high; and for The Heiress, costume designer Edith Head went to a New York fashion institute to study women's fashion of the nineteenth century to ensure that every detail would be perfect. For The Best Years of Our Lives, as Wyler reported in a magazine piece: “We sent Myrna Loy and Teresa Wright, and young Cathy O'Donnell out to stores in company with our costume designer, Irene Sharaff, to buy the kind of clothes they would buy and wear in the lives they live on the screen. Not only that, but we asked them to wear them for a few weeks so that the clothes wouldn't look too new.” In the same essay, he questions why rooms in Hollywood films “always seem about three times as big as they should be.” He goes on: “To me a man should seem at home in his home. He should move with ease in a background which he is familiar. He should know where chairs are without looking for them…. This union of oneness with man and his background are seldom found on the screen. A home isn't a home unless people act at home. Certainly it isn't a home if it seems like a stage.”8
Realism in film, however, goes only so far, and Wyler was too much of a showman not to understand that his plots needed heavy doses of melodrama if he was to entertain, move, and even instruct his audiences. He preferred properties that had been tested and proved successful in other forms, in part because they guaranteed a built-in audience, and in part because they delivered heavy doses of melodrama. All his films for Goldwyn, except The Westerner, were based on successful or famous literary properties. Of his three prewar loan-out films, Jezebel and The Letter were based on plays, while Mrs. Miniver grew out of a best-selling book. Those three works are primarily melodramatic, and The Letter, like Wuthering Heights, veers closer to expressionism than realism.
In this regard, it is important to note that Wyler was vitally interested in the mechanics and structure of storytelling; even though he never received screenplay credit on his films, he invariably made important contributions to the scripts. And, believing that writing and directing were interconnected, he tried to ensure that writers were always on the set. For his first sound film, Hell's Heroes, he conceived an ending so brutal that the producer insisted it be changed. On his next project, A House Divided (originally conceived as a silent film), he added almost a hundred scenes to the writer's revised script. He worked intimately with Lillian Hellman on the scripts she wrote for him (These Three, Dead End, and The Little Foxes), and he cowrote the minister's closing sermon for Mrs. Miniver, which was reprinted in numerous magazines.
One of the many projects Wyler worked on but was forced to abandon was How Green Was My Valley. It was eventually made into an Oscar-winning film by John Ford, but screenwriter Philip Dunne credits Wyler with coming up with the narrative device (limiting the story to Huw's childhood) that transformed the script. Also, after screenwriter Robert Sherwood dec
ided to leave the closing scene of The Best Years of Our Lives to the director's imagination, it was Wyler who invented the aircraft graveyard scene that became one of the film's most affecting moments. Correspondence between Wyler and Ruth and Augustus Goetz shows that the director made important suggestions with regard to the script of Carrie. Wyler also hired Jessamyn West to adapt her story collection, The Friendly Persuasion, for the screen and then installed his brother Robert to help her; he still managed to make some important changes of his own to their script. He did the same on The Collector.
Intimately connected to Wyler's preoccupation with realism and story construction was his commitment to bringing out the very best in his actors—sometimes to the point of alienating them completely. His penchant for retakes made him the scourge of some actors, who ridiculed him as “ninety-take Wyler” or “forty-take Wyler” or “once more Wyler.” His insistence on eliciting the best performance sometimes meant that he had an actor repeat the same gesture or hand motion until he felt it effectively revealed the character. For the famous scene in Jezebel when Julie Marsden arrives late to her own engagement party, Wyler instructed Bette Davis to hike up the train of her riding dress with her riding crop and hook it over her shoulder; he then exasperated Davis by making her go through the motion thirty-three times. As Davis commented years later, “No detail, however minor, escaped him.” Although she claimed that “Wyler could make your life hell,” she recognized that she had done her best work with him. And when she won her second Oscar for Jezebel, Davis acknowledged, “He made my performance…. it was all Willy.”9
In an antiauteurist study entitled The Genius of the System, Thomas Schatz argues that the structure of the studio system made it impossible to isolate any individual as the singular creative force behind a film. Nevertheless, in his section on Jezebel, he singles out Wyler's direction for “bringing Julie Marston [sic] to life, shaping the viewer's conception of both character and story.” He also points out that Wyler forced both Warner and Hal Wallis to recognize “how important Wyler's skills as a director were to the picture and Davis's performance.” Schatz elaborates: “Through the calculated use of point-of-view shots, reaction shots, glance object cutting, and shot/reverse shot exchanges, Wyler orchestrated the viewer's identification with and sympathy for Julie, which were so essential if the story was to ‘play.’”10
Wyler once remarked, “I want actors who can act. I can only direct actors—I can't teach them how to act.” He recognized that “the director's most important function centers on the performance of the actors,” and he considered getting the perfect shot secondary to capturing the best performance.11 His obsession with detail—the perfect gesture, the subtle exchange—added depth, subtlety, and complexity to his already charged compositions. No director in history has guided actors to more Academy Award nominations (thirty-five) or more Academy Award–winning performances (thirteen). If Wyler himself could not always articulate what he wanted from an actor, Charles Laughton's definition of great acting would surely pass his test: “Great acting is like painting. In the great masters of fine art one can see and recognize the small gesture of a finger, the turn of a head, the vitriolic stare, the glazed eye, the pompous mouth, the back bending under a fearful load. In every swerve and stroke of a painter's brush, there is an abundance of life…. Not imitation—that is merely caricature—and any fool can be a mimic! But creation is a secret. The better—the truer—the creation, the more it will resemble a great painter's immortal work.”12
Wyler was indeed committed to realism in décor, in performance, and in his preference for deep-focus shots. But David Thomson's insistence that he was merely “a reliable master of big projects,” one who “never felt the need to ponder [his scripts] too deeply,”13 is surely as overstated as Sarris's dismissal or Bazin's enthusiasm. Wyler's films, despite their diverse subject matter and multiple genres, display a remarkable thematic consistency. Much of his work mounts a quarrel with and an investigation of his adopted country—a personal inquiry that is reflected in the projects he chose to produce and direct and in the writers he worked with, many of whom were important literary figures of the day: Lillian Hellman, Sidney Kingsley, Sidney Howard, Elmer Rice, Robert Sherwood, Jessamyn West, Gore Vidal, Christopher Fry, and Jesse Hill Ford.
Wyler himself authored several published essays in which he articulated the responsibilities of the director-artist. In “Escape to Reality” he wrote: “I wondered why so few films and so few plays honestly reflect the conflicts of our times. Every age, every generation, every decade, every year, has some battle of mind, of emotion—some social cause that favors the time. Why does the screen seldom find these conflicts?”14 Three years later, when accepting the One World Award for Motion Pictures, he defined what he meant by morality: “I mean the morality of civilized men, which is the morality of humanism, and the acceptance of the social morality it imposes. The dignity of men everywhere should be our great epic theme—the struggle of men to build their societies and to create the wonders of art, of ethics and of science.”15
What these remarks indicate—and what is rarely discussed in connection with Wyler—is that his films clearly reflect a strong social and political vision. Sarris's judgment that Wyler's career “is inflating without expanding” is completely untrue.16 From the early 1930s, Wyler was either planning or directing films that tackled issues such as capitalism, class structure, war and pacifism, and repressive politics, notably the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). His choice of projects, though superficially diverse, reflects his abiding interest in important social issues and his quarrels with America.
Arguing Wyler's status as an auteur is largely irrelevant at this point in the evolution of film history, however. Any examination of production files from the studio era makes it plain that there was a varied division of labor and that every film was the product of many individual contributions. Scripts went through countless revisions and included scenes and dialogue by writers who were not acknowledged in the final credits. There were also some intense struggles between powerful producers and directors. While Schatz's claim that the auteur theory is “adolescent romanticism” may be a bit extreme, the notion of evaluating a classic Hollywood film solely as the product of an individual creative personality seems spurious. Of course, some powerful directors did manage to leave their mark on many of the films they worked on—Schatz cites John Ford, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, and Alfred Hitchcock as directors “who had an unusual degree of authority and a certain style.”17 And, as I have argued here, Wyler, too, possessed a “certain style.” He practically introduced depth of focus into the vocabulary of American cinema, and he, too, held an “unusual degree of authority,” producing twelve of his films and wielding considerable control over many others.
Wyler grew up in the business by working with two powerful producers—his cousin Carl Laemmle, who founded Universal Pictures, and Samuel Goldwyn. He learned something about power and artistic control on one of his earliest jobs, as an assistant on The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). Laemmle's production chief was Irving Thalberg, who treated the picture like a prestige project, even constructing a replica of Notre Dame Cathedral on the studio's back lot. Then, dissatisfied with the look of the film, Thalberg insisted on retakes with larger crowd scenes, and he made other budgetary decisions without consulting either Laemmle or the New York office. The resulting rift with the studio head was an object lesson to Thalberg: he could not change the culture at Universal, and he left the studio shortly thereafter. Wyler would have his own troubles with Laemmle and his son, beginning with the studio's first sound film, Hell's Heroes, which he directed on location (see chapter 1). In 1932, Wyler and his friend John Huston looked into developing their own projects, which they pitched to the studio. None of them ever got to the production stage.
Wyler's most important association was with Samuel Goldwyn, for whom he worked after leaving Universal. Their contentious relationship began in 1936 and continued unti
l after the war, culminating in Goldwyn's only Academy Award–winning film, The Best Years of Our Lives. Wyler chafed under the powerful producer's control, but he later admitted in an interview with his daughter, “He was the most important producer in my career because we made a series of pictures that were both critically and financially successful.” He added, “We had fights, but the fights were not over money. They were over…matters of taste.”18 They also reflected the inevitable clashes between two determined individuals who were each striving for a kind of perfection—Goldwyn pursued quality properties, and most of the films Wyler made for him were based on successful plays, but Wyler's own meticulousness often got in the way of Goldwyn's need to maintain something resembling a bottom line.
Still, the two had enormous respect for each other, and as Scott Berg observed, they had other things in common: “A rapport developed between the two men, partly because of their near-equal inability to express themselves. Deeper than that, after years of working almost exclusively with Gentile directors, Goldwyn had found a fellow European Jew with similar artistic aspirations.”19 If Goldwyn provided Wyler with the materials that released his genius, the director certainly gave Samuel Goldwyn Productions a measure of cachet it had not enjoyed before. Five of the films Wyler directed for Goldwyn were nominated for Best Picture Oscars. Berg wrote that Wyler's first film for Goldwyn, These Three, “gathered notices the likes of which Goldwyn had not received before. In language more thoughtful than the usual Hollywood superlatives, they treated the film with artistic respect, especially the demanding English critics.”20
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