William Wyler

by Gabriel Miller

  The story follows the fortunes of Evelyn Todd (La Plante), a recently fired chorus girl who is invited by a friend to go to a party thrown by a wealthy bachelor, Guy Emory (Robert Ellis), where she can make $50.4 Although Evelyn is presented as a sympathetic character, she knowingly puts herself in a risky situation by attending this party. Her theatrical background and her access to women who know their way around the party circuit invest her with a backstory that is more risqué than that of the comic heroines who would dominate 1930s social comedies. Evelyn gets herself into a sexually compromising position but manages to extricate herself and leaves the party, only to find that she is homeless and her furniture has been thrown out on the street. Evelyn, we soon learn, is a virginal young woman who is only trying to get along as best she can. She is picked up by the wealthy Paul Harrington (Neil Hamilton), who is being driven home in a cab. In a lame bit of comic business, he arranges to have three additional cabs pick up her furniture, and all the drivers head south. The two fall in love and get married shortly after this meeting, but trouble begins when Evelyn is rejected by Paul's mother and sister. Complicating the situation is Paul's uncle, Judge Harrington (Norman Trevor), who met Evelyn at Guy Emory's party and considers her unfit for his nephew. The judge tries to buy her off, but in an awkward comic sequence that dominates the last part of the film, Evelyn maneuvers the judge into a compromising situation, exposes him to Paul, and saves her marriage.

  The first part of the film shows Wyler's strengths as a director and as a social observer. The early scenes at Guy Emory's party anticipate the techniques he will use to depict high society in Dodsworth, Jezebel, The Heiress, and Carrie. As he did in The Shakedown, Wyler continues to explore the framing strategies that will distinguish his mature work.

  After Evelyn is fired from the chorus line, she returns to the dressing room and stares into the mirror while her friend, sitting to her left, tells her about Emory's party and the chance to earn $50 “just for looking pretty.” Evelyn is thus framed within a frame as she decides whether to negotiate the dangerous party scene, anticipating the way Wyler later frames Fran Dodsworth, Julie Marsden, and Carrie Meeber as they decide whether to embark on equally treacherous courses. Evelyn is, of course, part of a comic universe, and her likely fate is not as dire as that of the others, but because Wyler does not stage the party in a comic style, he is freer to explore the scene in ways that are more suited to his temperament.

  When she is first seen at the party, Evelyn is part of a crowd around the bar, where she tries to prove that she is an experienced drinker. Wyler squeezes her in the frame with a group of guests, as he later does with Fran Dodsworth when her husband finally decides to leave her. Evelyn is introduced to Judge Harrington, whom her friend describes as having “blue blood and green bucks.” Evelyn's attempts to flirt with the judge are so awkward that her friend sends her away, pointing her in Guy Emory's direction, while the friend takes on the judge herself. Guy immediately gives Evelyn $50, and Wyler cuts away to the friend putting her own money in her stocking. Obviously, Evelyn has placed herself in a compromising position, and Wyler is giving his audience a glimpse into the darker and seamier side of high society. In an attempt to get Evelyn upstairs, Guy spills a drink on her dress, which gives Wyler a chance to employ the expressive imagery of a staircase for the first time. He uses it here to achieve tension by shifting among the spatial structures inherent in the set—the downstairs public area of the party and Guy's private space upstairs. It also allows him to visually fill the frame vertically and in depth.

  Guy leads Evelyn upstairs, and while she is in the bedroom taking off her wet dress, Wyler cuts to Guy on the landing in a modified low-angle shot that emphasizes his unsavory desire as he looks down on the dancers below. Guy then surprises Evelyn by walking in on her while she is in her slip. Wyler again captures the action in a mirrored shot, matching the one in the dance hall, but this time including Guy. As the scene in Guy's bedroom plays out, Wyler's fondness for vertical lines and in-depth framing is apparent: he frames Evelyn between the bed curtains, a prisoner of Guy's lust, and then frames Guy himself in the window as he airs out the wet dress. When he lets it drop to the street below, Wyler's camera seeks out Evelyn in the rear, where she is again framed by the bed curtains. Sensing danger, she flirts with Guy and beckons to him, but then punches him and flees the house. Her resourcefulness in making this escape anticipates her ability to manipulate Judge Harrington in the film's final sequence.

  Wyler again uses the staircase, but this time for comic purposes, in the first scene of Evelyn and Paul after their marriage. Returning home, Paul finds Evelyn waiting on the staircase landing, where she assumes Guy's position from the earlier scene. In a comic variation on that scene, however, Paul climbs onto a desk to greet her on the stairs and takes her hand. Paul's mother and sister soon arrive to meet his bride, and Paul is seen greeting them in the living room. Wyler then cuts to Evelyn in the bedroom, where she is getting ready to meet her new family. That room, with the bed in the background, is now her safe haven—Wyler's pictorial repetition brings the two sequences together, emphasizing the contrast between them.

  Next, Evelyn tries to make a grand entrance by descending the staircase, but she slips and falls on her bottom. This inauspicious debut anticipates her failure to impress Paul's family, who look down on her lack of social standing. Here, Wyler anticipates his staging of the confrontation in These Three, as Martha and Karen try to defend themselves against the accusations of Mary Tilford. When Paul's family members distance themselves from Evelyn, Wyler isolates her in the frame. He cuts liberally throughout the scene, using shot–reverse shots and compositions that seclude Evelyn while the Harrington women, soon joined by the judge, join forces against her. Wyler will repeat this strategy seven years later, visually isolating his heroines in These Three as the forces of repression gather against them.

  The Love Trap was made in both a silent version and a 25 percent sound version. The latter features a musical score and synchronized sound in the final sequences, including the overly long confrontation between Evelyn and the judge. Because of the actors’ evident difficulty in making the transition to sound, what is supposed to be a comic sequence seems even more melodramatic, which, unfortunately, magnifies Wyler's struggle to keep the scene light and comic.

  Following the completion of The Love Trap, Wyler was asked to shoot some special scenes of La Plante in Spanish for a film exposition in Barcelona. Then Carl Laemmle Jr. (known as Junior), who was now the general manager of his father's studio, asked Wyler to direct an installment of The Cohens and the Kellys in Scotland, which he refused to do because he did not like the story. This was just the first of many times that Wyler stood up to a producer when he disliked the material he was offered. In a letter to his parents, he was already displaying the temperament of an artist: “I probably would be considered of the large army of ingrates who got their starts with Carl Laemmle and then left him. But I don't want to sacrifice my future for the past.”5

  Wyler's refusal to listen to Junior almost cost him his next project, Hell's Heroes—a film that would display Wyler's considerable gifts and allow him to impose his own vision on the material. Fortunately, Junior decided to sublimate his anger for the good of a project he had great confidence in. Recognizing that Wyler had brought a touch of class to both The Shakedown and The Love Trap, he decided to assign The Cohens and the Kellys to William Craft and let Wyler direct Hell's Heroes. It would not be the last time the director's intransigence netted him superior material.

  Hell's Heroes was a coup for Wyler, since it was to be Universal's first all-sound film and would require considerable outdoor location filming. Wyler later recalled the complications involved in making the film:

  It was made under tremendous difficulties because the camera had to be muffled in the padded booth with a soundproof window in front and a padded door in the back. Of course, George Robinson, the cameraman, was stuffed into the booth with the camera. Sinc
e the story had the men fleeing or trying to reach salvation, I couldn't very well have them stop all the time to declaim.

  They were fugitives and had to move even when they spoke. So, we had to devise moving shots with dialogue. That meant putting the padded boxes on rails. Just imagine a dozen guys pushing this padded shack on rails in Death Valley in August in absolute silence. Microphones were concealed in cactus and sagebrush every ten feet or so.6

  The film was based on a novel, The Three Godfathers (1913), by Peter B. Kyne, a writer of popular fiction whose work appeared regularly in magazines such as Collier's, the Saturday Evening Post, and Sunset. The novel, a retelling of the Gospel according to Matthew set on the nineteenth-century American frontier, had already been filmed twice before in silent versions—in 1916 by Edward J. Le Saint (starring Harry Carey) and in 1919 by Wyler's friend John Ford as Marked Men (also starring Carey). It would be remade twice after Wyler's version—by Richard Boleslawski in 1936 (starring Chester Morris, Walter Brennan, and Lewis Stone) and by Ford again in 1948, in Technicolor, as Three Godfathers (starring John Wayne, Pedro Armendariz, and Harry Carey Jr.; Carey Sr. had died a year earlier). Later in their careers, Ford would often joke that it was now Wyler's turn to remake The Three Godfathers.

  Kyne's novel begins with four outlaws holding up a bank in Arizona. As they flee, one is killed and another, Tom Gibbons, is wounded. The three survivors manage to make it to California, and after resting, they decide their best course is to head for a water hole known as Terrapin Tanks. But when they reach their destination, they discover that the water hole is dry. Then they find a woman in a wagon (with no horses) who is about to give birth. A baby boy is born in the evening, and before she dies, the mother names the child after the three men, asking them to be her baby's godfathers and to save him. Bob Sangster, the leader, agrees to her request, and all three men commit themselves to the well-being of the child. Having lost their horses, they must walk through the desert, taking turns carrying the child. Gibbons, because of his wound, is the first to die. Wild Bill Kearny dies soon after of thirst and madness, but not before telling Sangster how to get to New Jerusalem, the closest town. Sangster reaches the town on Christmas Day, thirsty, bloody, raving, and clutching the child to his breast. He hears music coming from a saloon, hands the baby to a woman, and collapses.

  Wyler's film, unlike the book and Ford's famous remake (his original does not survive), lacks sentimentality. Wyler wanted the film to be realistic, rooted in the sweltering desert locales. The screenplay, by Tom Reed, considerably darkens Kyne's story. Unlike the original and the other film versions (notably Ford's), Wyler's film begins and ends in New Jerusalem—the site of the bank robbery. Sangster knows that returning there means sure death because during the course of the robbery they killed a teller, who turns out to be the baby's father, in an ironic twist that is unique to Wyler's version. The Sangster of Hell's Heroes is a gruff, selfish character, unlike either his counterpart in the book or the almost saintly Robert Hightower (Wayne) of Ford's film. And whereas the novel's Sangster is the first to agree to the dying mother's request, Wyler's Sangster is the last; the others practically have to force him to do so. Initially, he even refuses to share the milk they find in the wagon with the baby; he wants to drink it himself.

  In both the novel and Wyler's version, Sangster dies after reaching New Jerusalem. In the final version of Wyler's film, but not in novel, he deliberately drinks poisoned water so that he can walk the last mile; then he dies on a church doorstep. In Ford's version, however, Hightower lives, and his heroism saves him from hanging. He is sentenced to one year in jail, and the film makes it clear that after he serves his time, he will return to help raise the boy, who has been adopted by the sheriff and his wife.

  Wyler's original ending was more brutal than the one in the released film:

  The surging, angry crowd has surrounded Bickford [Charles Bickford, the actor playing Sangster].

  A dance-hall girl snatches away the child from the dazed bandit. The crowd knocks him down, ties him. A rope is thrown around him and a horseman begins to drag him through the street. The Sheriff rushes up, claims Bickford in the name of the law. He picks up the fallen man, promises to hang him.

  We see the bandit's face—inhumanely gruesome, nightmarish. The Sheriff shakes him. No sign of life. He slaps his face again. With his finger he pries open the bandit's eye and we see the dead, glazed white. The Sheriff announces him dead. Ugh!7

  The supervisor Junior had hired to oversee Wyler thought the director's commitment to realism had ruined the film. He wrote to Junior that the ending was “the most gruesome scene we have ever seen on film and…will give audiences nightmares for weeks.” Junior obviously agreed even before he saw the ending, for he wrote to Wyler: “It looks from this report that you have evidently butchered a great picture.”8

  Wyler filmed Hell's Heroes on location in the Mojave Desert and the Panamint Valley in August because he wanted the sweltering conditions to emphasize the realism of the setting and the extreme predicament of the three outlaws. Indeed, the desert functions as a force of nature, a brutal stage on which a tale of redemption is played out. Wyler strips Kyne's story of its religious symbolism, concentrating instead on man alone in an indifferent universe where he is forced to work out his own fate. Though less grand and less visually spectacular than Ford's Monument Valley setting, the desert here becomes a typical Wylerian enclosed world in which the sum of one's life is determined solely by the efficacy of action. The birth of the baby in this setting not only functions as a symbol of life but also becomes emblematic of man's capacity for endurance and moral regeneration.

  The film opens with a breathtaking composition: a desert landscape framed by a grotesque, bent cactus-like tree. Its interesting shape foreshadows the opening in the covered wagon's canvas top that will later frame the mother. Next, in an extreme long shot, we see three riders moving toward the camera. Coming closer, they discover a sign for New Jerusalem that is accompanied by a hangman's noose—an unusual double image associated with death and salvation. Barbwire Gibbons (Raymond Hatton), who will be the first to die, sacrificing himself for the group and for the child, is framed by the noose. The first view of New Jerusalem reveals an isolated, ramshackle town that occupies only one side of a street and is surrounded by the infinite space of the desert. Wyler nearly duplicates this scene when Jim McKay arrives in San Rafael at the beginning of The Big Country (1958).

  A fourth member of the group is already in town, staking it out. After the bank robbery, one of the four outlaws is killed, shot by the minister—one detail (among others) by which Wyler undercuts the religious themes of the story. The three who escape soon find themselves trapped in a dust storm that causes them to lose their horses and forces them to take shelter by digging a hole and covering it with burlap. Wyler cuts to the next day with a lyrical shot of a circling buzzard, which, despite its gruesome implication, has a haunting beauty.9 The juxtaposition of the buzzard and the men's emergence from their hole in the ground offers another double image of death and potential resurrection.

  The shots that follow show the three men, in shadow, walking across an immense landscape that is blank, bleak, and empty—except for a sign warning of poisoned water, topped by the skeletal head of a steer. When the men reach Terrapin Wells, they discover that the well has been dynamited and the water is gone. There is, however, a covered wagon, and Sangster goes to investigate. His first sight of the woman inside is a point-of-view shot through the sight of his rifle. There is nothing compassionate about his reaction, as he hides his discovery from his friends, hoping to have the woman to himself. But when Kearny (Fred Kohler) sees her, he immediately realizes that she is sick and pregnant. In both shots, the woman is framed by the curved lines of the wagon's arch. In Ford's film, that composition suggests a cathedral arch before which the men stand in awe, hats in hand, as they look inside, but Wyler's framing is devoid of any such inspirational feeling, as are the initial reactio
ns of the men. Sangster's reaction, in fact, seems utterly bestial.

  One of Wyler's subsequent shots of the wagon is again suggestive of his emerging style. As Sangster and Gibbons wait for Kearny on a hill, Wyler shoots the wagon in deep focus, with rock formations in the background. The effect is poetic, indicating that the men's salvation is within reach if they can overcome their selfishness and move beyond it to get to New Jerusalem again. The men eventually agree to be the baby's godfathers, although they baptize him in dirt instead of water. In this version, the baby is named after his father, Frank Edwards, who was killed by the godfathers earlier in the film. Wyler's film contains no scene like the one in Ford's showing the burial of the mother.

  Wyler handles the deaths of Gibbons and Kearny with restraint. Gibbons, who has been weakened by his wound, decides that he can struggle no longer, delaying the others. He lies down at the foot of a tree and tells them to go on, refusing the offer of water. Then, in the best deep-focus composition in the film, Wyler shows Sangster and Kearny moving away in the front of the frame, while Gibbons and a tree shaped like a cross are seen in the background. We hear a shot but do not see Gibbons die, as the men walk toward the camera. Kearny's death is handled with utter simplicity: after bidding good night to Sangster in front of the campfire, he feeds the baby for the last time, and when Sangster wakes up the next morning, Kearny is gone, leaving behind only a note.