William Wyler

by Gabriel Miller

  In fact, the legendary “Goldwyn touch” should more properly be called the “Wyler touch.” All of Goldwyn's best films were directed by Wyler, and after his departure in 1946, most of the producer's subsequent films were undistinguished. As Danny Mandell, who edited a number of Wyler's films and countless others for Goldwyn, remarked, “I never knew what the Goldwyn touch was. I think it was something a Goldwyn publicist made up.” Wyler himself was more direct: “I don't recall his contributing anything other than buying good material and talent. It was all an attempt to make a name for himself as an artist. But as far as being creative, he was a zero.”21 Wyler was surely being overly harsh, for he did admire Goldwyn's respect for talent and his desire to hire the best people, especially writers. But Wyler was protective of his legacy to the end. In 1980, the year before he died, he exclaimed to Berg, “Tell me, which pictures have the ‘Goldwyn touch’ that I didn't direct?”22

  Nearly all of Wyler's prewar films for Goldwyn engage with social issues. His first film for Goldwyn, These Three (1936), examines the destructive force of lies and evil intent. Many American films released that year were still dealing with the Depression, even though the economy was finally on the upswing. But Wyler's film—unsurprisingly, considering his European roots—focuses instead on the impending storm abroad. Dead End (1937) is based on an agitprop play of the same name by Sidney Kingsley. Here, Wyler exposes the debilitating effects of slum life as a breeding ground for gangs, gangsters, the breakup of families, and prostitution. As a Depression film, it also deals with unemployment, the violence visited on strikers demanding better wages, and the damaging divide between the wealthy and the poor. The Little Foxes (1941), his second Lillian Hellman adaptation in five years, further demonstrates how rampant capitalism and industrialism can destroy a family, ravage a community, and rape the land.

  Wyler, like many of his colleagues and friends in the film industry, was fully committed to the American war effort, both prior to U.S. engagement and during combat. He directed one of the most acclaimed documentaries of the war, Memphis Belle (1944), which is the only film ever reviewed on the front page of the New York Times. Some years after the war, in a letter to Y. Frank Freeman, production chief at Paramount, he explained his personal engagement: “As a foreign-born American I was perhaps more alarmed from the beginning by the threat of Nazism than the average American.”23

  Born into a Jewish family in Mulhouse, France, Wyler was twelve years old when World War I began. His birthplace was fought over by the French and German armies, and Wyler told his biographer about spending the night in the cellar and emerging in the morning to learn whether he was French or German.24 The Germans occupied the town until the end of the war, when it was taken over by the French. Interestingly, Mulhouse was also the birthplace of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish military officer accused of treason for being pro-German. Members of the Dreyfus family were still living in Mulhouse when Wyler was a boy, and the lessons of the “Dreyfus affair,” which consumed France for over a decade and served as an index of French anti-Semitism, were not lost on him. In fact, Wyler's files indicate that he actively tried to rescue relatives in Europe before and during the Second World War and succeeded in saving a member of the Dreyfus family.

  Before America's entry into World War II, Wyler accepted an assignment at MGM to make Mrs. Miniver (1942), which he always referred to, proudly, as a propaganda film. He started work on the film when the United States was still technically neutral, thus making the story's interventionist bent potentially controversial; then he upped the ante by significantly altering a scene in which Mrs. Miniver encounters a downed Nazi pilot on her property. In a late script version, the pilot is presented sympathetically, as a young man who reminds Mrs. Miniver of her son, who recently joined the British Air Force; she cleans his wounds and offers him tea. But Wyler scrapped all this sentimental harmony and turned the pilot, in his words, into a “typical little Nazi son-of-a-bitch” who threatens Mrs. Miniver and predicts, “We will come. We will bomb your cities, like Barcelona, Warschau, Navik, Rotterdam. Rotterdam we destroy in two hours.” Louis B. Mayer, fearful of offending his foreign audiences, wanted the scene to remain as written, but Wyler held his ground. Then, when Pearl Harbor was bombed, Mayer relented, and Wyler's version prevailed. He further sharpened the film's message by coauthoring a new speech to be given by the vicar in the partially bombed-out church, calling the fight against the Nazis “the people's war.” By this time, the vicar was addressing American audiences as well, and the speech was so effective that it was printed in many publications, including Time and Look.

  As early as 1941, Wyler had tried to join the war effort personally, volunteering for the Army Signal Corps, but he was turned down. When he finally received his commission as a major in the Army Air Force in 1942, his orders were to produce films about the Eighth Air Force, designed to boost morale. Memphis Belle (1944) deals with the crew of a Flying Fortress from the Eighth Air Force on its last mission, and Thunderbolt (1945) chronicles how the face of Italy was changed from the air. In an essay titled “Flying over Germany,” Wyler wrote about the spirit of community aboard a plane, which became a living testimonial to his notion of humanism: “You're inclined to worship the skipper once he's brought you back safely and look on all other men on board as brothers. They depend on each other. They save each other's lives every day.”25

  The chasm between that ideal and the reality of the postwar experience became one of the central themes of Wyler's masterpiece, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). That film reflects Wyler's own feelings as a war veteran and, as such, is his most personal film. The narrative follows three returning servicemen who encounter problems while trying to reintegrate themselves into society, and it explores some of the same issues of the postwar culture that were laid bare in Arthur Miller's All My Sons, which opened on Broadway a year later. When Wyler's character Al Stephenson remarks, “Last year it was kill Japs, and this year it's make money,” he is sounding the disillusionment of countless citizen-soldiers. The film raises other vital issues as well: unemployment, strikes, and volatile labor conditions; the specter of another war—when “none of us will have to worry because we'll be blown to bits the first day”—versus American isolationism; and the ongoing trend of small businesses being taken over by conglomerates and chains.

  Best Years won Wyler his second Oscar and marked the end of his association with Goldwyn. In July 1945, he entered into an ambitious venture with Frank Capra and Samuel Briskin to found Liberty Films, an independent film company designed to “allow each individual complete freedom to pursue his own creative bent and retain his artistic integrity.” This enterprise—which was soon joined by George Stevens—grew out of these directors’ war experiences, which changed the way they thought about film and its relevance to society. In his essay on Wyler, Bazin quotes the director's comment on Best Years: “Without this experience, I could not have made my movie the way I did. We had learned to better comprehend the world…I know that George Stevens isn't the same since he saw the bodies at Dachau. We were forced to see that Hollywood hardly reflected the world or the time we lived in.”26

  Liberty Films released only one film, Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946), before cash-flow problems forced a sale to Paramount, which signed Wyler to a five-picture deal and guaranteed him artistic independence. Although he soon learned that the studio would insist on project and budget approval, thus compromising his independence, Wyler's choice of projects reflected his engagement with postwar issues. Like the post-Dachau films of Stevens, Wyler's postwar films projected a much darker vision than his prewar work.

  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 th
ose 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 moo
d 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.