William Wyler

by Gabriel Miller

  In The Big Country, Wyler utilizes the western genre to tell the story of an eastern hero who comes out west to marry the woman he loves. A peaceful man in a violent country, he refuses to be lured into the feud that consumes his fiancée's father or to be goaded into fistfights by the local bullies. Wyler thus tries to invert the classic western formula by substituting a pacifist hero, a man who does not carry a gun and refuses to use one, even when pushed into a duel with the son of the enemy. Nonetheless, the film concludes with a violent confrontation between the two feuding landowners, which Wyler films partially in a heroic style in an apparent effort to compensate for the anticlimax of the younger men's indecisive meeting. By trying to have it both ways, he hopelessly compromises the film's message.

  Both these “pacifist” films seem to confirm that Wyler himself was not a pacifist. Two world wars had taught him that human nature is dark, flawed, and at times inexplicably evil, and there is no way to deal with it other than through violent confrontation. In both films, Wyler indeed demonstrates that he is “no Quaker.”

  He explores this issue most effectively in Ben-Hur, a film about political tyranny, betrayal, and, once again, the limits of pacifism. Judah Ben-Hur, a prince of Judea, is opposed to the tyranny of the Roman occupation but also preaches nonviolence in an effort to prevent armed conflict. He turns violent, however, when his childhood friend Messala betrays him, arrests his family, and condemns him to the life of a galley slave. Ben-Hur shows strength of character by saving the commander of his ship during a battle, but his hatred of Messala indirectly leads to his enemy's death during the famous chariot race scene. The story's pacifist message is made plain at the end, when Judah hears an account of Christ's Sermon on the Mount from his beloved, Esther. The film ends with him climbing the staircase of the family home to greet his mother and sister, who have been cured of their leprosy as Christ died on the cross. This conclusion raises some questions, however, for Wyler was not a religious man, and the sections of the film devoted to Christian themes are far less compelling than the relationships between the central characters. The Christ story is included as a concession to the source novel, and Wyler's resorting to it as a kind of deus ex machina reveals his frustration with the pacifist theme.

  While the protagonists of all three films are clearly men of principle and sympathetic characters, they are also flawed messengers in worlds that are based on violence, dissension, and hatred. Perhaps because of his experiences with the HUAC, Wyler saw himself in those men—well-intentioned, committed, and humanistic, but still susceptible to compromise.

  Ben-Hur also deals with the subject of betrayal. When Messala asks Judah to give him the names of rebels and troublemakers, Judah retorts, “Would I retain your friendship if I became an informer?” Messala replies, “To tell me the names of criminals is hardly informing.” Judah defends his refusal to name names by stating that these individuals are not criminals but “patriots.” Clearly, the unsettling experience of the HUAC era was still on Wyler's mind when he made this epic film, which he followed with a remake of The Children's Hour, another parable about the HUAC. Politics and principles remained at the center of his films of this period, and in giving Judah those lines, Wyler was still defending his persecuted colleagues.

  Wyler made four more films before retiring in 1970. The two most interesting are The Collector (1965) and The Liberation of L. B. Jones (1970), both of which reflect his increasingly dark view of human possibility and, despite the earlier film's English setting, the blighted American social landscape. The Collector, surely Wyler's most pessimistic film to date, presents a rebuttal to the quasi-religious ending of Ben-Hur. Unlike that sprawling epic, this film returns to the claustrophobic interior settings of Wyler's youth as he tells the story of a disturbed young man who kidnaps and imprisons a young woman in a dungeon. At the end of the film, Wyler makes an interesting change to the plot of the John Fowles novel on which it is based, as if forcing the audience to remember his earlier work. Struggling to escape, Miranda hits her captor with a shovel, drawing blood. Although she then has an opportunity to finish him off and escape, she does not follow through. Her revulsion against violence links her to earlier Wyler protagonists, but her failure to match her captor's cruelty seals her doom.

  Wyler's final film is just as bleak. The “liberation” promised in the title is, in fact, the death of that character. His story anchors an unremittingly grim exposé of race relations in America—a dramatic counterpoint to the success of contemporary films emphasizing racial harmony, such as In the Heat of the Night, which was also written by Jones scenarist Stirling Silliphant, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. In fact, Wyler sets up his audience for a potentially uplifting liberal morality tale and then undercuts that expectation at every turn. The film's main character, a lawyer who is also the town's leading citizen, initially appears to be a man whose humane instincts will win out; instead, he is revealed to be corrupt and unethical. His liberal-minded nephew, who has come south to join his uncle's law firm, is impotent and unable to effect change; at the end, he merely leaves town, having accomplished nothing. A black man who has come to town to exact revenge on the policeman who beat him when he was younger decides to renounce violence, only to change his mind and kill the lawman after the death of Jones. Released in the aftermath of the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and as the Vietnam War was still raging, The Liberation of L. B. Jones offered no solace to the American public. It was Wyler's last word as a filmmaker.

  Wyler's career as a director spanned forty-five years, beginning with a series of two-reel westerns in the 1920s. He went on to make successful films in a variety of genres, including social dramas, melodramas, comedies, documentaries, epics, and, at the end of his career, a musical, Funny Girl. He grew up with the film industry. Having started at Universal, he cut his teeth on numerous silent westerns, then directed that studio's first all-sound movie shot outside the studio (Hell's Heroes). He also directed the first black-and-white film in Vista-Vision (The Desperate Hours) and one of the first in Technorama or widescreen (The Big Country).

  Considered a preeminent director by his peers, he was nominated as Best Director twelve times by the Motion Picture Academy and won three times. (He was also nominated three times as a producer.) His films won 38 Oscars out of a total 127 nominations. His actors earned thirteen Oscars, having been nominated for thirty-five. These are all record numbers—no other director has come close. In 1965, the Academy gave Wyler its Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for motion picture achievement. He won the New York Film Critics Award and the French Victoire Award three times each. He was nominated for the Directors’ Guild Award six times, winning it once, and in 1966, he received its D. W. Griffith Award for distinguished achievement in motion picture direction. In addition, he won the Cannes Film Festival's Golden Palme for Friendly Persuasion, and in 1976, he became the fourth recipient of the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award, joining fellow directors John Ford and Orson Welles.

  Individual directors heaped praise on him as well. Billy Wilder considered the opening scenes of The Best Years of Our Lives to be the most moving he had ever seen. Sergei Eisenstein loved The Little Foxes and, according to Lillian Hellman, showed it numerous times at parties; he told her that for the shaving scene alone, Wyler “deserved motion picture fame for the rest of his life.”31 Japanese director Kamisaburo Yoshimura studied Wyler's Wuthering Heights, which he viewed during the war, and thereafter declared Wyler his favorite foreign director, echoing his countrymen Mizoguchi and Ozu.32 Wyler is also admired by Curtis Hanson, who did a two-part interview with Wyler when he was the editor of Cinema (1967), as well as Steven Spielberg. Bette Davis considered him the best director she ever worked for, and Charlton Heston included him among the finest directors in film history. (Both won Oscars under Wyler's direction.) Lillian Hellman termed him simply “the greatest of all American directors.”

  In 1966, Henri Langlois, director of the Cinémathè
que Française, launched a retrospective to celebrate Wyler's place in film history. Referring to the deep-focus technique, Langlois noted that Wyler's new style, created in the late 1930s, had influenced filmmakers on four continents. He declared that critics were mistaken when they credited that style to Orson Welles, who, he said, “was still groping and being influenced by Wyler.” Langlois went on to say: “Wyler's strength lies in having gone all the way in analyzing the most delicate and impressionistic of human feelings and to have put his art and his science of directing actors at the service of a new concept. The concept was to allow him to go beyond naturalism and without betraying truth or simplicity in acting, give performances with the intense strength which the masters of the German silent cinema had reached, but without resorting to their artifices and their symbolism.”33 Wyler himself sounded a similar note when he said, “A movie should not be an advertisement. Drama lies in the subtle complexities of life—in the greys, not the blacks and whites.”34

  This study traces the development of Wyler's “complexities” by examining the evolution of his cinematic style and his engagement with the American social scene. Attention is also paid to the production histories of many of his most ambitious projects, in an effort to show how they progressed and changed, finally emerging as the finished films we enjoy today. It is my hope that Wyler will emerge in these pages not as a mere craftsman but as a significant artist who expressed his ideas and convictions through his films, many of which serve as a testament to a creative talent and a dedicated humanist who was fully engaged by and with his times.

  1

  Discovering a Vocation and a Style

  The Shakedown (1929), The Love Trap (1929), Hell's Heroes (1930), A House Divided (1931)

  William Wyler grew up with the movies. He came to America from Mulhouse (Mulhausen), Alsace-Lorraine, in 1920 at the invitation of his mother's first cousin, Carl Laemmle, who was the founder and head of Universal Studios. Laemmle's young cousin would soon eclipse his fame in the industry that would come to dominate American culture.

  Laemmle himself had arrived in his adopted country in 1884, joining his older brother in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where he became a branch manager for a successful midwestern clothier. When he was thirty-nine, Laemmle moved to Chicago, seeking to become his own boss. A chance stroll past a movie theater on State Street aroused his curiosity, and he paid the ten cents admission to watch the film being shown there. Three weeks later, he owned his own nickelodeon. That was in 1906. Within a decade, Laemmle would have a chain of movie theaters throughout the Midwest. By 1910, he had become a film producer and had founded Independent Moving Pictures, which later became Universal Pictures. Laemmle also introduced the star system to Hollywood when he lured Mary Pickford away from the Biograph Company by offering her more money and prominent billing. Prior to that innovation, actors’ names were not revealed to the moviegoing public.

  Laemmle vacationed in Europe every summer, and when Wyler's mother, Melanie, learned that her famous cousin would be traveling through Switzerland, she wrote to Carl about her son. He responded by inviting them to meet him at a hotel in Zurich. Laemmle offered the young man a job at Universal's New York office that paid $25 a week, from which $5 would be deducted until the cost of the transatlantic trip on the Aquitania had been reimbursed. Known for bringing ambitious young men to America, Laemmle already had more than a dozen relatives on his payroll. Indeed, his penchant for nepotism was legendary, even prompting an Ogden Nash couplet: “Uncle Carl Laemmle / has a large faemmle.” Many years later, however, critic Charles Affron would note, “Wyler's career is an excellent argument for nepotism.”1

  William Wyler turned out to be an ambitious kid. Within a year, he asked to be transferred to California, and by 1922, just two years after arriving in America, he was working, in his words, as a “gofer” on The Hunchback of Notre Dame starring Lon Chaney (some sources list him as an assistant director). By 1925, shortly after his twenty-third birthday, he was directing his first two-reel western, making him the youngest director on the Universal lot. That first “mustang” two-reeler (twenty-four minutes long) was Crook Buster. Over the next two years, he directed twenty-one mustang films and also worked on MGM's Ben-Hur (1925). On that film, he was one of sixty assistant directors assigned to control the chariot race scene, for which the studio had hired thousands of extras and built a Circus Maximus. In 1926, Wyler graduated to his first five-reeler, Lazy Lightning, a “blue streak” western. He would direct five more through 1927.

  The first film to offer intimations of what would become Wyler's distinctive mise-en-scène was The Shakedown (1929), which was released in both silent and sound versions and cost around $50,000 to make. Wyler's brother Robert discovered the story. He had spent the previous two years at Universal learning the business and preparing to become a producer, and he also had a hand in writing the script, along with Charles A. Logue and Clarence Marks. Robert would be associated with a number of his brother's films in the future, but his contributions to The Shakedown were uncredited.

  The story concerns a crooked boxer, Dave Hall (James Murray), who is involved in a shakedown ring that travels from town to town, where the bosses arrange fixed fights and encourage the locals to bet on the outcome. After establishing his identity in one town and provoking a fight with Battling Rolf, a professional fighter, Dave, who has become the local favorite, loses the fight, and the townspeople who have bet on him lose their money. Dave then moves on to establish himself in another town and set up another shakedown. Most of the film takes place in Boonton, where Dave works in the oil fields; there, he falls in love with a waitress, Marjorie (Barbara Kent), and adopts an orphan, Clem (Jack Hanlon), whose life he saved. Dave is beginning to feel at home there. When his associates come to town to set up his fight with Rolf, he wants to run away, but Clem convinces him to stay, fight, and redeem himself. Dave wins the fight and presumably will settle down with Marjorie and Clem.

  The Shakedown is an early example of Wyler's artistry in evoking the American way of life, introducing, in embryonic form, what would become his signature combination of social observation and an entertaining story that appeals to the audience. As an early example of the gangster narrative (which would become a seminal genre just two years later), The Shakedown still resembles many silent films featuring gangster protagonists, in that its generic signs are basically unformed and sublimated to the melodramatic elements of the story. The emphasis here is on redemption—that of a corrupted hero rehabilitated by a saintly heroine and (for good measure) an engaging orphan—rather than the traditional gangster's dramatic fall from prominence and belated moment of bitter recognition.

  The film opens in a bar with a pool table—a locale that would soon become iconic in gangster films. Some of Wyler's most impressive camera work follows, as he introduces Boonton, an oil town. He first shows Dave working on an oil well, where he is framed by its wooden scaffolding; in the background, a long line of wells dominates the landscape. Then, in a virtuoso sequence, Wyler situates his camera below the well while Dave, mounted on a pulley, is hauled up to the top. When the scene shifts to the café where Marjorie works, Wyler gives the frame a double perspective, combining the cozy interior of the hometown eatery with the wells looming in the background—a fusion of the old, rural America and the booming economic energy of the new.

  Here, Wyler introduces a tension that will be developed with more complexity in his mature work, characterizing the twentieth century as a site of conflict involving the individual's relation to the emerging industrialized society—particularly the opposition between traditional social forms (the café and the incipient family unit) and the gangster figure, who represents the fragmentation of tradition and the potential for anarchy created by new patterns of consumption and the corresponding emergence of new and more liberating lifestyles.2 As noted earlier, Wyler at this point still sublimates this thematic culture clash to the exigencies of the melodramatic plot, concentrating on Dave's evolving rel
ationships with Clem and Marjorie and his decision to quit the shakedown gang.

  The Shakedown also contains some early examples of Wyler's staging strategies, the most interesting of which is his use of deep focus early in the film. The story opens in a saloon, where Dave wins a pool game. The gang organizer then puts Dave's winnings under a napkin and challenges anyone to try to take them as Dave stands on the napkin. This is Battling Rolf's cue to join the sting. Wyler places Rolf in the foreground of the frame, where he is seated at the bar, while Dave seems to disappear in the rear amid a group of patrons who nearly blot him out. Further in the distance, the buildings of the town are visible through a doorway. The crowd disperses, but Wyler maintains his composition in depth by continuing to focus on Rolf in the foreground, while Dave is framed against the exterior setting. The director seems to be indicating that his protagonist is not a bad man and has the potential to move into the townspeople's world and embrace their traditional values.

  Universal loved the film. The internal reports on The Shakedown called it “Another Willie Wyler Winner.” Another raved, “Mr. Wyler comes through 100%.” A third seemed to predict where the young director was heading: “Willy Wyler's direction should be highly recommended. He is developing like a million dollars and his picture shows a sense of realism and pace and endows every little incident in it with charm and entertainment value.”3 The studio's enthusiasm, however, was not reflected in the film's reviews; most critics found it bland and a bit saccharine.

  In the spring of 1929, Wyler agreed to direct a bedroom comedy, The Love Trap, starring Laura La Plante, one of Universal's biggest stars. The film's budget exceeded that of The Shakedown by some $25,000, and it had a longer shooting schedule. Although the plot falters, especially at the end, Wyler manages to demonstrate, very early in his career, the capacity to move almost effortlessly from genre to genre. In The Love Trap, he does best in the darker sections that dominate the first part of the film, exploring the often dangerous, desperate world of the single woman, whose plight in this case is exacerbated by the loss of her job and her home. Wyler is ruthless in exposing the divide between the classes, which, despite the “happy ending,” is never really breached.