It is after this scene that Wyler cuts to the “quality of mercy” speech that opens the play but serves here as a herald for Mary's entrance bearing the flowers that will be her undoing. Mary, of course, is the antithesis of mercy, as Karen tries to show the girl after catching her lies. Mary rejects Karen's admonitions and is punished. Angry and bitter about her punishment, she runs away from school and then tells her grandmother the lie that will upend all their lives. The sequence in which Mary informs her grandmother that Martha is having an affair with Joe concludes with Mary at the top of the stairs and Mrs. Tilford below, having been persuaded by the lie. The power has now shifted to Mary, who seems to be in control of events.
The confrontation between Mrs. Tilford and the victims of Mary's lie is another display of Wyler's emerging style. Again, there are minor modifications of the play, such as when Joe announces that “three people” (instead of two) are coming before her “with their lives spread on the table.” Martha, Karen, and Joe enter together and appear posed, shot from a low angle to emphasize their moral stature and the rightness of their position. Wyler repeats this grouping a number of times during the scene, even staging some of the dialogue sequences with all four (including Mrs. Tilford) in the frame without cuts. However, most of the sequence proceeds traditionally, with a cut to each member of the trio as he or she emerges to make a statement and then retreats back to the group.
Wyler next repeats the grouping of the three in the courtroom scene, where they face a jury that is filmed as if its members were a single unit— uniform and intolerant of difference. This image echoes the impression created in the graduation scene, with its visual evocation of a society that marches in step. At the end of the trial, when the jury finds against the three, the onlookers break into applause, as if confirming the societal acceptance of Mary's lie.
The dialogue that opens act 3 of The Children's Hour is some of Hellman's best writing. As the two women exchange words that are bare, static, and brutal, the playwright indicates that their previous vitality has been drained and life has lost its meaning. They seem to occupy the sterile world depicted by the absurdist playwrights twenty years later:
MARTHA: it's cold here.
KAREN: Yes.
MARTHA: What time is it?
KAREN: I don't know. What's the difference?25
In filming this sequence, Wyler finds a visual equivalent for the stark dialogue. The scene opens with a view of the school's exterior. The yard is full of leaves, the atmosphere overcast and desolate, making the place look even more forbidding than it did when Karen and Martha first saw it in its run-down condition. At that point, they were viewing it in the light of day; now, it appears dark and hopeless. The camera finds the two women seated before a fireplace, speechless, and then pulls back, framing them in the window as the rain begins to fall.
In both the play and the film, Karen sends Joe away. The play's Karen simply feels that they need some time apart, while the film's Karen still has doubts about Joe and Martha. When Karen admits to her friend that she had suspicions about Joe even before Mary's lie, Martha clutches her hand in sympathy, a gesture that is repeated from the first part of the film and a trope that Wyler will employ again at key emotional moments in later films. Finally, in this film's last staircase scene, Martha admits to loving Joe as Karen climbs the stairs—it is a symbolic movement that Wyler will repeat at the end of Jezebel, when Amy leaves Julie at the bottom of the staircase, effectively granting her permission to care for Preston. At this confessional moment in These Three, Martha is left standing at the foot of the stairs, looking up as Karen ascends, seemingly having renounced her love—as Catherine Sloper will do at the end of The Heiress.
As in the play, the film's action is partially resolved by the recovery of the stolen bracelet. In the play, a remorseful Mrs. Tilford calls on Karen to apologize for her actions, but in the film, Martha goes to Mrs. Tilford and asks her to call on Karen and encourage her to go back to Joe. In a later scene, Karen finds Joe in a coffeehouse in Vienna, where they embrace and kiss, to the delight of the patrons.
This ending was undoubtedly a last-minute contrivance. Hellman had offered a version of this conclusion in her October 8 screenplay, but that scene ends with Karen staring through the window of a Viennese bakery and then laughing before running up the steps of the nearby hospital. The November 23 version merely notes at the end, “Tag end to follow.” This notation is preceded by Martha's farewell instructions to Karen: “Go back to Joe—wherever he is. Tell him that you believe him now. I'm going to leave you Karen…. I'll be all right now. I'm sure of that. Very sure.”26 Goldwyn, who liked happy endings, may have insisted on the Viennese finale to assure the audience of the couple's reunion, but its actual provenance is not clear.
Like the endings of Come and Get It and Dead End, this one seems oddly muted. Martha has been set adrift—although her actions in the aftermath of the crisis are presented as noble and selfless, she is left alone, her future unclear. The trio celebrated in the film's title has been dispersed by malevolence and mistrust. The film's conclusion, nonetheless, is clearly more hopeful than that of the play, where Martha commits suicide and Karen, having sent Joe away, is left alone. In the play, the three friends have been reduced to one.
Despite its “happy ending,” the film presages the political import of the gathering storm in Europe better than Hellman's play manages to do. And Wyler's remake in 1962, with the play's original title intact, would be even more telling in the aftermath of the HUAC hearings and the blacklist. Audiences would come away from both these cinematic versions sobered by the dramatic evidence of damage done by the self-righteousness, selfishness, and blindness of seemingly good people.
These Three received superb reviews—the best of both Goldwyn's and Wyler's careers up to that point. The film made Wyler an important director, and Goldwyn would henceforth trust him with some of his most important projects. Graham Greene, then a film critic for the Spectator, wrote: “After ten minutes or so of the usual screen sentiment, quaintness and exaggeration, one began to watch with incredulous pleasure nothing less than life…. Never before has childhood been presented so convincingly on the screen, with an authenticity guaranteed by one's own memories.”27 David Selznick called These Three “a superb picture certain of great success.”28 Jesse Lasky wrote in a telegram, “Nothing that has happened recently has thrilled me as much as preview of your last picture…stop…Your direction is human[,] fine[,] and distinguished and this picture will put you right at the top.”29 Lasky was right—Wyler was now one of Hollywood's major directors.
4
The Wyler Touch
Dodsworth (1936)
In Counsellor-at-Law, Wyler deals with the cultural divide in Depression-era America while touching on the need for community and a concern for what constitutes a meaningful life. In adapting Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour, he focuses on Hellman's thematic study of how evil can unmoor and destroy a group, especially when individuals lack the moral backbone to stand up to it. In Dodsworth, Wyler translates another important literary property: Sidney Howard's successful dramatic adaptation of Nobel Prize–winning novelist Sinclair Lewis's work of the same name. While that novel deals, in part, with the Jamesian motifs of the American abroad and the resulting clash of cultures—a subject that would naturally interest Wyler, a European immigrant—it is also the study of a marriage and of the essential American character. These key issues, lightly touched on in Counsellor, receive fuller treatment here.
Dodsworth, like much of Lewis's major fiction, asks what it means to be an American—a question that Counsellor's George Simon confronts as well. In Elmer Rice's work, however, we never gain insight into Simon's thought process, and this lack undercuts the play's claim to complexity. Unlike Lewis's more celebrated works Babbitt and Main Street—both satires that focus on the smug provincialism of small-town American life—Dodsworth explores a wider subject. Here, protagonist Sam Dodsworth moves from small-town Zenith t
hrough a variety of European locales where he encounters a larger world and new ideas. Thus investing his tale with an international theme, Lewis downplays the satire and concentrates on a comparative analysis of American and European character, not endorsing either as a cultural standard but trying to isolate what is most valuable in each. In the end, Dodsworth offers a sympathetic view of American values—Lewis admires his countrymen's naturalness, idealism, and even their business sense and vision. Sam Dodsworth may have some of the small-town “hick” in him, but he also possesses the wisdom to judge what is good and bad in the foreign world he encounters and to use what he learns there as a means to grow. Ultimately, he is not intimidated by European culture, and he refuses to be stymied by those who attempt to belittle him. Lewis celebrates Sam's emerging confidence and sense of self.
Sam Dodsworth is introduced as a captain of industry, a wealthy automobile manufacturer and inventor who has made important contributions to the industry. He believes in “the Republican Party, high tariffs, and as long as they did not annoy him personally, in prohibition and the Episcopal Church.” Lewis takes pains to distance this protagonist from Babbitt: “To define what Sam Dodsworth was at fifty, it is easiest to state what he was not. He was none of the things which most Europeans and many Americans expect in a leader of American industry. He was not a Babbitt, not a Rotarian, not an Elk, not a deacon. He rarely shouted, never slapped people on the back, and he had attended only six baseball games since 1900. He knew, and thoroughly, the Babbitts and baseball fans, but only in business.”1 Portrayed as an amiable, energetic, and honest man, he is not crude like many of his associates. He enjoys and appreciates culture, but not people who are pretentious about it. He even looks forward to his European vacation as an opportunity to learn something about the world and about himself.
In this novel, published before the stock market crashed, Lewis presents Dodsworth as a capitalist hero. In so doing, he champions American progress, enterprise, and advancement, but he also indicates that he sees some danger signs. Dodsworth sells his Revelation Automobile Company to the Unit Automotive Company, which will absorb it and turn Sam's high-quality cars into cheaper, mass-produced models. The president of Unit, Alec Kynance, prefers assembly lines to European architecture and is more interested in balance sheets and bottom lines than in the quality and excellence of his product. And through him, Lewis raises important questions about the future of American industry as it passes from the hands of true pioneers such as Dodsworth. Will America continue, like Dodsworth, to strive for excellence, or will it settle into the mass-produced mediocrity represented by Kynance? Will America achieve the kind of civilization that will be the envy of Europe, or will it slip into decadence?
Sam Dodsworth approaches his foray abroad with the awe typical of a child of nature confronting civilization. Soon, however, he begins to respond to the European locale and enjoys exploring it on his own. In Paris, while visiting Notre Dame, he reflects on his own search for meaning beyond the sphere of his wife's shallow, pretentious friends: “He saw life as something greater and more exciting than food or sleep. He felt that he was no longer merely a peddler of motor cars; he felt that he could adventure into this Past about him—and possibly adventure into the far more elusive Present. He saw, unhappily that the…existence into which Fran had led him was not the realization of the ‘great life’ for which he had yearned, but its very negation.”2 Dodsworth is forced to ponder what America is—its strengths and weaknesses—and as a result, he matures and grows. When he returns home for a short visit without his wife, Fran, he sees his homeland differently. New York, which now appears noisy, aimless, and petty, triggers a negative reaction, and when he gets to Zenith, he sees his friends through new eyes as well: “He saw slowly, that none of his prosperous industrialized friends in Zenith were very much interested in anything whatever. They had cultivated caution until they had lost the power to be interested…. The things over which they were most exclamatory—money, golf, drinking—…these diversions were to the lords of Zenith not pleasures but ways of keeping so busy that they would not admit how bored they were, how empty their ambitions.”3
Lewis's capitalist hero does not despair over these things. He still revels in American inventiveness and energy, and he sees that, unlike Europe, America still has a frontier of limitless possibilities. During the course of his trip, he even plans a new industrial enterprise: the development of garden suburbs and dwellings that will evolve into the best in America. In Dodsworth's eyes, America is the future, while Europe is mired in the past. In Richard Lingeman's words, “What Dodsworth finds in his quest is not only a healing of his psychological troubles but his sense of identity, of acceptance of who he is, including his fundamental Americanness.”4
Fran Dodsworth is the opposite of her husband. She thinks of herself as cultured because she visited Europe before she was married. Regarding her husband and her own country as uncultured, she becomes a parody of the European sophistication she so admires—all surface glitter and charm, but incapable of truly understanding her new surroundings. If Europe renews Sam's sense of self, it becomes the instrument of Fran's destruction. Lingeman labels Fran a “lonely, narcissistic child who can't help herself.”5 Sam accepts this shortcoming in his wife and strives to overlook her flirtations and affairs until he can take no more. As Sam understands, Fran is afraid of growing old and is attempting to use Europe as her fountain of youth. Like Gatsby, she will discover that she cannot turn back the clock or stop time in its course.
But Fran is by no means an empty person. Her frustration with her life as an industrialist's wife in Zenith strikes a chord with the reader and with Lewis. She tells Sam, correctly, that she has been a dutiful wife, a devoted mother, and a citizen of her community, but now she wants more. Having exhausted everything Zenith has to offer, she is desperate for a new experience. “Any real woman, she argues, is quite willing…to give up her own chances of fame for her husband, providing he is doing something she can admire…. But she isn't willing to give up all her own capabilities for the ideal of industrial America.”6 Some of Lewis's critics have called Fran a deficient character because the novelist allows his distaste for the narcissism of his own first wife, Grace Livingstone Hegger, to overwhelm the character. But it is important to recognize that Fran exhibits the qualities that Lewis admired in Grace as well: her personal flair and her independent spirit. It is this side of Fran that Wyler tries, without success, to make more prominent in his film version.
The novel is full of trenchant observations and beautifully realized scenes. When they are presented effectively, as in the scene with Kynance, Lewis's penchant for social observation hits its mark. Unfortunately, as a number of the novel's critics have pointed out, Lewis is too close to his protagonist to give the novel the objectivity it strives for. Too many characters are introduced merely to present their opinions in a mechanical way, and some seem no more than sounding boards for Dodsworth. Lewis also rushes through his descriptions of Europe, presenting cities as though he were writing a guidebook rather than a novel. The most serious problem is that many potentially dramatic scenes are either summarized or unrealized, and this flaw is corrected in some scenes of Sidney Howard's dramatization.
Howard, like Rice, was a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright (They Knew What They Wanted [1925]). He convinced Samuel Goldwyn that he could make an effective screenplay out of Lewis's 1925 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Arrowsmith. The eventual film, which was directed by John Ford and starred a miscast Ronald Colman and Helen Hayes, was a critical success that did not do well at the box office. While working on that project, however, Howard recommended that Goldwyn buy the screen rights to Dodsworth, which were available for $20,000. When Goldwyn refused, Howard dramatized the novel for the stage—with some last-minute assistance from Lewis, who also contributed an essay, “The Art of Dramatization,” to the published version. The play opened to critical acclaim in 1934, with Walter Huston in the title role. Goldwyn then dec
ided to buy the film rights, although the price had jumped to $160,000. When Howard reminded him that he could have owned the rights three years earlier for a fraction of the cost, Goldwyn quipped, “This way, I buy a successful play. Before, it was just a novel.”7
Dodsworth became the longest-running production of Walter Huston's career, playing to capacity crowds at the Shubert Theatre for 1,238 performances. Fay Bainter, who had just completed her first film role in This Side of Heaven (and who would win an Oscar under Wyler's direction in Jezebel), played Fran Dodsworth. Huston's wife, Nan Sunderland, played Edith Cortwright, with whom Dodsworth falls in love at the end. Huston thought the play worked because audiences could identify with both Sam and Fran. As he explained, “Everybody knows Sam Dodsworth and his wife. We recognize them among our friends and neighbors—the earnest, plodding chap who has devoted himself to business so unrelentingly that he has forgotten all about play and romance, and his pathetic wife, bored with the mere spending of money, who craves the things that quicken and color life before the fires of youth are gone forever.”8 After the Broadway run, the play toured a variety of American cities, concluding in Cincinnati in March 1936 to effusive reviews. By that time, Sunderland had replaced Bainter, who had become ill, in the role of Fran.
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