The film's final moments are beautifully crafted. Left alone, Sangster is initially angry at the baby and threatens to leave him behind. He can't, however, and after feeding the baby the last of the water, he sets off for New Jerusalem with the child in his arms. At one point, Wyler films that desperate journey in one long tracking shot, showing not the trudging man but, at first, straight footprints, then a crease along the track, which is soon revealed to be made by his trailing rifle, which Sangster drags for a while and then abandons. We then see more footprints, his hat, more footprints, and a handkerchief. At last, following a very high-angle shot looking down on Sangster as he staggers forward, carrying the baby, Wyler cuts to an expressionistic point-of-view shot of the hangman's noose, blurred and out of focus, as Sangster collapses by the poisoned well. Before that, however, he lets his final bag of gold scatter in the sand—implying, perhaps, that he has discovered a different treasure. He decides to drink the poisoned water, knowing that it is his only hope of traveling the final mile or so into New Jerusalem.
When he finally reaches the town, the inhabitants are gathered in church, singing “Silent Night” and celebrating Christmas. Wyler cuts to a long shot of Sangster walking up the street, back to the interior of the church, then back again to Sangster, tracking him slowly as he staggers toward the church. Wyler films Sangster framed through the windows of the bank as he moves past it. Finally making it into the church, he dies with his godson in his arms, surrounded by the congregants. Without any fanfare, Bob Sangster, the most selfish of the three godfathers, is thus redeemed through his sacrifice—as the other two have already been redeemed by giving up their lives to ensure the baby's deliverance.
Peter Kyne hated Wyler's grim version of his sentimental, religious story. In a letter to screenwriter Tom Reed, he proclaimed, “Frankly, I think your Mr. Wyler murdered our beautiful story…. It was dreadfully directed and dreadfully played by that leading man…. I don't care how much money the picture makes, my conscience will not let me cheer for the atrocious murder of one of the few works of art I have ever turned out.”10
The film did indeed make money, grossing $18,000 during its first week in New York. It also did well in other parts of the country and in Europe. Most important, it established Wyler as an important director. Universal offered him a new contract at $750 per week; this was supposed to jump to $1,000 the following year, but because economic conditions at the studio were bad in 1932, Wyler was ultimately forced to compromise on his salary, which leveled out at $850 per week.
Seeking another quality property to direct after Hell's Heroes, Wyler tried to interest Junior in The Road Back, the sequel to the studio's highly successful adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, but Junior was hesitant to commit. Finally, Robert Wyler found the story that would become his brother's next film. A House Divided was adapted from Olive Eden's magazine story “Heart and Hand” (the original title for the film as well) by John Clymer (The Love Trap) and Dale Van Every, with some additional dialogue by John Huston. Most likely inspired by Eugene O'Neill's Desire under the Elms, it is the story of a middle-aged fisherman, Seth Law, who sends for a mail-order bride after his wife's death. He is expecting a sturdy, hardworking woman named Ada, but the petite and pretty Ruth Evans arrives instead, because Ada has already married. Initially, Seth rejects Ruth as being too frail, but during their first dinner together, he decides to marry her after all. The marriage worsens the already tense relationship between Seth and his son Matt, who hates both his father and the fisherman's life that has been imposed on him. When Matt tries to protect Ruth from his father, the two men fight, and Seth is seriously injured in a fall from the staircase. During his lengthy recuperation, Ruth and Matt fall in love. Suspecting that his wife loves his son, Seth crawls upstairs one night and challenges Matt to a fight. Ruth, terrified, runs to the pier and hides on a boat. Refusing to strike his father, Matt goes to find Ruth, only to discover that a storm has dislodged the boat from the pier, and Ruth has been carried out to sea. Father and son head out to save Ruth, catching up to her just as her boat is approaching some dangerous rocks. Seth ties a rope around himself, providing a lifeline for Matt to reach Ruth. As the young couple reach the safety of the shore, they discover that Seth's boat has capsized, and he has drowned. The film ends with Matt and Ruth looking out to sea.
The film stars Walter Huston, who gives a complex and sympathetic performance as the gruff, unsympathetic Seth. In this early sound film, Huston has no difficulty transitioning to the new medium. Matt is played by Kent Douglass, and Ruth by Helen Chandler, who was also the love interest of Bela Lugosi in Dracula that same year. During production, Wyler again taxed Junior's patience, as the film ran ten days over schedule and $53,000 over budget, bringing its total cost to $284,000.
Wyler also had problems with the script, which was originally written as a silent film. Just before filming began, Jack Clymer was asked to transform the script into a talkie, which he managed to accomplish in two and a half weeks, although Wyler was left with a script that had plenty of gaps. As a result, he improvised a great deal on the set, ultimately adding almost 100 scenes to the 332 in Clymer's script. Junior blamed Wyler for the overruns, ranting, “You do not have to shoot every scene from three different angles. Confine yourself to the shots necessary to cover the action.”11 Less than a week later, he admonished Wyler again: “For your information, permission for retakes must be given by me and I don't want this to ever happen again.”12
Unlike Hell's Heroes, which is almost wholly an outdoor film, A House Divided emphasizes confined indoor settings and shifting spatial relationships between characters and sets, providing multiple examples of the director's emerging preference for composition in depth. As in Hell's Heroes, where—much to Kyne's displeasure—Wyler largely eliminated the story's religious and sentimental overtones, his visual arrangements here enforce an emotional distance from a story that is at heart melodramatic.
This film, too, opens with a shot of nature—this time featuring the sea, the mountains, and the coastline between them. In the middle distance, a rowboat has just settled on the beach. Soon we see some men, including Seth Law, untying a coffin from the boat. (Always deliberate in his visual details, Wyler ends the film with a corresponding image of Seth tying himself to a rowboat to save his wife and son—an act that leads to his death, the boat becoming his coffin.) Seth, his son Matt, and others then proceed toward a cemetery. Like its predecessor, this film begins with a scene of death, although here it is literal rather than symbolic. During the procession, Wyler cuts to another in-depth long shot, casting the diminished figures in shadow even as they are dwarfed by the mountains and the sea. As the minister concludes the service and the mourners file away, Wyler draws attention to the sound of the earth hitting the coffin, and this mundane detail further undercuts the sentimentality of the scene, while adding to Matt's grief and pain over the death of his mother. Seth, a hard man, is unaffected by the funeral. Like O'Neill's Ephraim Cabot (also played by Walter Huston in the Broadway premiere of Desire under the Elms), he has a cold, indifferent nature. Later, after taking his emotional son to a bar and forcing him to drink, Seth fights with Matt, knocks him out, and carries him home.
On the day Ruth arrives, Seth refuses to meet her, so Matt does so instead. Wyler's handling of their meeting is an introduction to his mature style: the sequence opens with a shot of the sitting room, featuring a staircase that will figure prominently in the rest of the film. Matt dashes down the stairs to answer the door and is startled to see Ruth, who is framed in the doorway. Most of their ensuing dialogue is filmed in two-shots; Wyler cuts away to Ruth only twice, and Matt never appears in the frame alone. This minimal cutting preserves the sense of their coming together—something that is never established in the scenes between father and son. Matt then shows her around, and Ruth takes to the water immediately, declaring, “I always knew I'd love the ocean.” The scene ends with them standing by the water; it then dissolves to a high-a
ngle shot of the front of Seth's boat as it enters the harbor, dominating the space as if to mock Ruth's dreams.
Returning home after a day of fishing and meeting Ruth for the first time, Seth immediately rejects her as a wife. In the frames that make up this sequence, Wyler maintains his earlier strategy of fixing his attention on Matt and Ruth in two-shots, with minimal cutting. Seth, in contrast, is usually pictured alone. When he belatedly decides to propose during dinner, Ruth seems ambivalent, and while she is drying the dishes with Matt, Wyler returns to his two-shot framing. Seth then enters, framed by the doorway in deep focus, and announces that the marriage will be celebrated that very night. Matt leaves to make the arrangements, and Seth moves to the front of the frame, taking Matt's place beside Ruth. All this significant movement is conveyed in a single take without a cut—clearly presaging Wyler's mature style and demonstrating that as early as 1931, he was experimenting with the technique of filming significant action in segments whose duration and staging exceeded the reach of the standard shot.
When Seth and Ruth return home after the wedding, Wyler shoots them at opposite ends of the room, emphasizing the distance between them. Seth walks slowly toward her, while Ruth, her back to him, looks toward the window; she begs to get out of the marriage, but Seth insists that all will be well. The mood becomes further strained when Matt enters and Wyler cuts to a triangular three-shot with Matt in the center—another type of framing he will come to favor when emphasizing the inherent tension in a given situation. Seth sends Ruth upstairs. Matt then stands at the foot of the staircase, pleading with his father to give Ruth time, but Seth tells his son to leave and says that perhaps Ruth will give him a real son. Seth then ascends the stairs, and Wyler cuts to a frontal shot of him that practically fills the frame—a composition he will use again in The Heiress. When Matt tries to stop him, a fight ensues on the landing, and Seth falls to the ground floor, unconscious. (As in The Little Foxes, Wyler uses the staircase here as an area where the characters negotiate power.) Unlike the scene in the bar after the funeral, Matt defeats his father this time, and Wyler emphasizes this power shift in the last shot of the sequence by framing Seth's face in the space between the staircase railings.
In the final confrontational sequence, a storm rages outside as Seth, lying in a bed downstairs, asks Ruth to massage his legs. While she does so, Seth tries to woo her, showing great tenderness and sensitivity—here, Huston demonstrates his range by making the character sympathetic and multidimensional. However, this compassionate moment is interrupted by Matt, and Wyler cuts to another triangular shot with the son in the middle. Soon Matt and Ruth ascend the stairs, leaving Seth (still not fully recovered from his fall) on his downstairs bed. In a low-angle shot, Seth watches as Matt, now framed by the railings, bids goodnight to Ruth—the son has clearly triumphed. Wyler builds sexual tension in this sequence as he cuts between the principals, with the sounds of the storm in the background—a scene the writers clearly lifted from Desire under the Elms, when Eben declares his love for Abbie. As Seth writhes on his bed, Ruth paces the room upstairs, her pent-up anxiety symbolized by the pelting rain against the window that frames her. These shots are intercut with images of Matt, who is also pacing and also goes to the window, opening it and letting the rain wash over his face—an expressive shot that Wyler would repeat in Wuthering Heights.
As Ruth finally enters Matt's room, Wyler cuts to the scene downstairs. In a shot composed in depth, with the railing in the foreground and Seth sitting up in the background, he initiates the final confrontation between father and son. Seth slinks toward the staircase like some primordial sea creature that emerged from the ocean at the beginning of time. As he clutches the railings, his face is framed by them, expressing both his desire and his hatred of the son and rival who has reduced him to this state of bestial impotence. He struggles up the stairs, catches the lovers together, and vows to kill Matt. Matt refuses to fight his crippled father, but there is a scuffle; Matt falls down the stairs but recovers and goes after Ruth, who has fled into the storm.
Wyler concludes the film with father and son trying to rescue Ruth, and Seth dying in the process. Like Hell's Heroes, this film ends with the death of its most compelling character. The final image is a brief shot of Matt and Ruth looking out to sea. Although there are a few other characters in the film, and the fishing village is depicted effectively, Wyler makes this tragic story convincing through his obsessive concentration on the three principals. Nothing matters beyond their struggle in an enclosed space, which allows him to experiment with the framings that would invest the story with visual and geometric tension. Throughout his career as a director, Wyler would thrive in the studio setting with properties, often originating on the stage, that were limited and confining, thus pushing him to experiment further with depth-of-field staging, which tested the limits of the shot's visual richness.
2
Coming into His Own
Counsellor-at-Law (1933)
The experience of directing A House Divided whetted Wyler's appetite for more serious projects. That desire was also fueled by John Huston, with whom Wyler formed a lifelong friendship. (Huston once commented that he considered Wyler his best friend in the industry.) Huston, who had lived among the poor in Mexico, convinced Wyler to try a socially conscious film. Hoping to develop a story about the millions of Americans who had been dispossessed and left jobless by the Depression, the two men decided to live among the poor and the homeless to find material for their film. “To know what it was to be a bum, we both took ten cents with us, went downtown in old clothes…. We got a lousy free dinner in a mission after we listened to a spiel and signed statements to the effect that we had come to Christ. Then we spent the night in a flophouse. Ten cents it cost.”1
That experience produced no script, but Huston and Wyler did collaborate on a screenplay based on a property called “Steel,” which Universal had owned for some time. After reading their script, Carl Laemmle Jr. was interested in producing the film, but the project was eventually shelved. The pair was not idle for long, however. Universal had bought the rights to Oliver La Farge's 1929 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Laughing Boy. Working on that script would occupy Wyler and Huston for much of 1932.
Laughing Boy focuses on the clash between mainstream American culture and that of the Native American peoples of the Southwest. La Farge, who was also an anthropologist, utilized material from his frequent archaeological and sociological expeditions to the region. His novel deals with poverty and the spiritual alienation of Native Americans, as well as prostitution and racism.
Wyler believed that he could turn this story into an epic film foregrounded by a compelling love story, even though Laughing Boy's love interest, Slim Girl, works for a time as a prostitute for white men. By way of research, Wyler and Huston made multiple trips to Arizona, where they camped out with the Navajo. They also traveled to Oklahoma City and Lawrence, Kansas, to watch sacred dances and confer with medicine men on the reservations of the Hopi, Comanche, Crow, and Blackfoot. In his autobiography, Huston wrote of sitting “all day long in a Hogan watching a sand painting being made.”2
Wyler was also in contact with La Farge, who helped by authenticating the details of the script. In a letter written in 1932, Wyler asks him for more color sketches of gods and goddesses and for sketches he can use “for costuming for any or all characters at different stages of the story.” He even asks for pictures of blankets “at different stages of weaving.”3
The project was eventually shelved by Universal, primarily because of problems related to casting the leads. Huston had proposed making the film with real Indians—Mexicans or American Indians—”but even Willy thought that was too wild a notion.”4 In a letter to La Farge, Wyler did not specify why the studio had halted production, merely reporting that the film was “indefinitely shelved or postponed.” He went on to write, “I have tried, although unsuccessfully, to interest another studio in the purchase of the book and script, which I under
stand Universal is willing to sell, and I hope to be able to accomplish this—if not now perhaps later this year, because I don't think Laughing Boy should remain unproduced.”5 Universal eventually sold the rights to Metro as a vehicle for Ramon Novarro, but Huston dismissed the film as “wretched and vulgar.”6
Wyler and Huston next worked on a script based on Daniel Ahearn's story “The Wild Boys of the Road.” Like the original, their script, titled “Forgotten Boy,” was about children who had run away from home during the Depression because their parents could not support them. Many of them rode the rails, crossing state lines. In some states, officials refused to allow these children to get off the trains, and when a dozen of them died from starvation and thirst in a Texas boxcar, it caused a national scandal. Wyler and Huston traveled around California, talking to brakemen, hobos, and kids. Wyler also had a reader from the studio search for stories in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner about children caught committing crimes, and he attended night sessions of juvenile court.
Huston recalled the script's final scene, involving two boys who had tried to rob a pawnshop: “One of them had been seriously wounded—dying—and the other held a menacing crowd at bay with a gun in his hand. Standing over his dying friend, he shouted to the crowd, ‘You killed him!’ The camera then came around so the kid was pointing the gun into the audience, with the accusation, ‘You killed him!’”7 The film was never made because, according to Huston, as it was being prepared for production, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's new administration promptly put these runaways to work in the reforestation program of the Civilian Conservation Corps.
In 1932, Wyler directed a film for Universal, Tom Brown of Culver, about a rebellious boy attending a military academy and his relationships with various friends. Although this material had already been filmed, and the protagonist's character type was based on the nineteenth-century British story “Tom Brown's School Days,” Wyler researched the project with the same thoroughness he had devoted to the two unrealized scripts co-written with Huston. While spending two weeks living in a barracks at a military school, he heard that upperclassmen terrorized the freshmen and wanted to witness this practice firsthand. “So one day I got a couple of older boys to hide me in a closet,” he recalled, and he watched as naked plebes got “slapped around for no reason.”8 He included such a scene in the film, but the superintendent of the school, who had final script approval, insisted that it be removed. Nonetheless, Wyler was proud that he had filmed the project on location—a rarity in those days.
William Wyler Page 6