In this regard, Wyler uses two scenes at Pennistone Crag as contrasts to incidents that follow. In the first scene, Heathcliff and Cathy are shown as children, anointing the spot as the site of their kingdom, divorced from the rest of the world. This idyllic moment is followed by the death of Mr. Earnshaw, one of Wyler's most striking compositions. Again, a single flaming candle dominates the center as the children, with their backs to the camera, are framed by the entrance to another part of the room; the low ceiling and the door frame seem to squeeze them into a tight space—a direct contrast to the expansive landscape of the previous scene. The lighting is mostly dark as they face the staircase where Dr. Kenneth (Donald Crisp) descends to inform them of their father's death.
The next pairing shows them as older: Heathcliff, who is now a stable boy, sees Cathy running toward the crag through a window, which will serve as a connecting leitmotif for the sequence. He joins her at their “castle,” but when they hear the sounds of the Lintons’ party, Cathy insists that they go and look in on it because she wants “dancing and singing in a pretty world.” This marks the end of their idyll, announced visually by the first window view, indicating that Cathy will be torn between her desire for society and the need to stay true to her essential self. In the evening darkness, they jump over a wall and make their way to the Lintons’ house to peer inside at a brightly lit room—a vision framed by the window. Cathy and Heathcliff, in contrast, are lit by low-key lights, suggesting their gloomier life at Wuthering Heights. The Lintons’ guests are elegantly dressed and dancing, while the plainly dressed couple stands in shadow outside. As they stare at the bright spectacle, the camera pans with their gaze, showing that Cathy, at least, is dazzled by what she sees. When the dogs alert the guests to the intruders and then attack them, Wyler contrasts the formal attire of the Lintons and their guests, which seems oddly extravagant outdoors, with the more natural appearance of Cathy and Heathcliff. Once they enter the house, however, to attend to Cathy's wounded ankle, it is the young couple who appears out of place in the glare of the lighted room.
When Cathy returns to Wuthering Heights after an extended recuperation at the Linton home, she quarrels with Edgar Linton (David Niven), who is now in love with her, over his unkind and demeaning remarks about Heathcliff. She runs upstairs, sees herself in the mirror dressed up like a Linton, and proceeds to rip off her dress. This willful reaction against the elegant costume in her framed reflection offers a variation on the scene in Jezebel when Julie, mirrored from behind, is trying on ball dresses at the dressmaker's and rejects the traditional white gown in favor of the red one that will destroy her relationship with Pres. Here, realizing that an engagement to Edgar will ruin her, Cathy sheds her finery and runs to meet Heathcliff at their “castle.” This vacillation between orderly respectability and her untamed love for Heathcliff will continue for the rest of the film.
These contrary impulses explode in the scene where Cathy tells Ellen that Edgar has proposed to her. When she talks about Edgar's virtues, she is seated, but when Ellen asks her about Heathcliff, she becomes agitated and moves about, commanding the camera's attention. After she accuses Heathcliff of having “sunk so low,” Wyler cuts to the kitchen, where Heathcliff had been hiding, and a flash of lightning illuminates the spot where he once stood, making it his surrogate. Then, as Cathy realizes that she “is” Heathcliff, the storm erupts again, and the lightning illuminates her. This melodramatic mise-en-scène is excessive but in keeping with the rest of the film.
Cathy finally does marry Edgar, and as their home life is introduced by Ellen's narration, Wyler repeats his camera movements and framing from the earlier scene when Cathy and Heathcliff peered into the Lintons’ home for the first time. Again, it is dark, and Wyler's camera moves through a lighted window, which at first frames Cathy doing needlepoint. (Her activity anticipates that of another Cathy—Catherine Sloper—whose needlepoint is also a substitute for sublimated passions.) She is sewing an angel, a representative of the heavenly world in which she does not belong (as she told Ellen earlier). Heathcliff enters in a long shot, striding across the length of the room. Now returned from America, he is a gentleman and has bought Wuthering Heights. The scene concludes as it began, with Wyler's camera reversing direction to exit through the window as a storm rages in the dark.
The final moments of the film, as Heathcliff takes the dying Cathy in his arms so that she can see the moors from the windowed doorway to the balcony, summarize—as Harrington points out—all the windowed images in the film:6 the banging window shutter in the opening sequence, Lockwood reaching his hand through the window and feeling Cathy's spirit, Heathcliff shoving his hands through a window after Cathy goes off with Edgar, the two camera movements through the window into the Linton house, and Cathy crying “I am Heathcliff,” with the windows behind her. All these carefully composed scenes are contrived to represent the emotional turmoil raging within the characters, as well as demarcating the boundaries between nature and society, between the world of experience and that of the imagination.
These same conflicts were explored by Wyler in different ways in earlier films. Counsellor-at-Law's George Simon is torn between his immigrant past (his true self) and the “real American” he wants to become. These Three's Karen and Martha expect to live peacefully and happily in the insular world of their own creation until an evil harbored within their walls destroys it. Dodsworth is torn between his love for his wife, which is destroying who he is, and his growing need to declare his independence and restore his sense of self. Julie Marsden chafes at being bound by social rules but realizes too late that she has lost her chance at happiness by prioritizing her independent spirit. Barney Glasgow, like Catherine, ruins his life by choosing society and success over love.
Wuthering Heights is Wyler's most self-consciously experimental film. Its weaknesses derive from Merle Oberon's failure to bring alive the earthier aspects of Cathy—much of her performance seems forced—and from Olivier's struggle with dialogue that is overly literary and announces its theme too often. Olivier credited Wyler with teaching him how to act for the camera, but much of his performance remains theatrical and contrived—as if he were trying to compensate for Oberon's lack of vitality in the emotional scenes. Wyler, however, manages to offset these shortcomings with his camera work, realizing the spirit of the novel with his technical and visual virtuosity. In Wuthering Heights, he consolidates and articulates his themes in dramatic cinematic terms, heralding his status as an auteur.
There is a postscript to this story. The film, as conceived, ends with Heathcliff's death. After hearing Lockwood's tale of hearing and seeing a woman at the window of the bridal chamber, Heathcliff rushes into the storm to Pennistone Crag, where he freezes to death. The published screenplay ends with the following description: “It [the camera] dissolves to HEATHCLIFF lying at the CRAG, his flesh frosted in death, and this sight dissolves to a series of views of the moors as CATHY and HEATHCLIFF beheld them in the springs, summers and winters of their youth, ending with TWO BIRDS hovering over the ‘CASTLE,’ then flying away into the winter sky.”7
Wyler is not wholly sympathetic to any of his characters who try to turn back the clock or make time stand still—both Fran Dodsworth and Barney Glasgow are ultimately defeated. Catherine Earnshaw also makes a tragic mistake, which she recognizes and pays for, while Heathcliff is so obsessed by his need for revenge that he destroys others. This couple's wild and destructive passions exploded Hollywood's standard template for romantic movies (as did Dodsworth by focusing on a middle-aged couple). Variety put it best: “Wuthering Heights in theme, characters, plot and setting possesses not one familiar attribute for which studio scenario departments search zealously through thousands of manuscripts, plays, novels, and synopses. It violates all the accepted rules of successful film stories. Its leading characters are something less than sympathetic—they are psychopathic exhibits.”8
This rebellious quality was precisely what initially attracted Wyler, wh
o gravitated toward stories and characters that veered from the norm. The film's original ending was consistent with Wyler's view of characters who are either unable or unwilling to mature or who make wrong choices. (Judge Roy Bean in The Westerner meets a similar fate.) Goldwyn, however—motivated in part by a disastrous preview held two weeks after the last retakes were completed—insisted on a “happier” ending. The audience response cards from that showing were among the worst Goldwyn had ever read.9 The audience found the film hard to follow and the final image off-putting. Goldwyn asked Flora Robson, who was still in Hollywood, to read several speeches designed to tie episodes of the film together. He also wanted Wyler to create the illusion of a happy ending by showing the star-crossed couple's spirits walking off into the mist and snow together. Wyler recalled, “He didn't want to look at a corpse at the fadeout. So he asked me to make a shot of them walking hand in hand through the clouds to show that they were together in heaven. I told him there was no way I would shoot it.”10 Despite Wyler's refusal to violate the spirit of his film, Goldwyn was undeterred. He asked Henry Potter to film the closing image of Olivier's and Oberon's doubles from the back. Wyler always maintained that the resulting image was horrible, but the audience loved it. With Goldwyn's corrections, the second preview was a great success.
Wyler's first western since Hell's Heroes in 1930, The Westerner is, naturally, an outdoor film. By 1939, when it was made, the genre was reemerging in John Ford's Stagecoach and Cecil B. DeMille's Union Pacific. The Westerner was released in 1940, a year that also featured Fritz Lang's The Return of Jesse James, Michael Curtiz's Virginia City, and Henry King's Jesse James. The return of the western was a sign that the Depression was waning, for the genre reflected a sense of optimism that celebrated America's founding myth. The Roosevelt administration fostered this buoyancy through the National Recovery Administration's and Works Progress Administration's support for artists, the writing of state guidebooks, and other initiatives of the Federal Writers’ Project. Unlike the gangster film, which had ushered in the decade, the western suggested that America's story was moving forward.
The Westerner exhibits many western themes and motifs that had been introduced in literature and echoed in earlier films but would become mainstreamed as these films matured and deepened in the 1940s and 1950s. Wyler's film is notable, however, for its reshuffling of these standard themes, presenting them in unusual ways. In their survey of the western genre, George Fenin and William Everson describe The Westerner as “one of the most outstanding films of the period” but also as “strange, moody, and unevenly paced.”11 All these judgments are true. Wyler and his writers—Jo Swerling, Niven Busch, and Stuart N. Lake—take on a variety of themes: the solitary hero/drifter and his relationship to the land, wilderness versus civilization, homesteaders versus cattlemen, and the impact of the law (represented by the historical figure of Judge Roy Bean) on an emerging town. Wyler also tosses in another historical character, Lillie Langtry, as an idealized woman with whom Bean is infatuated—thus introducing an aspect of his character that complicates our reaction to him. Also, the relationship between the hero, Cole Hardin (Gary Cooper), and Bean (Walter Brennan) clearly interests Wyler more than Hardin's evolving romance with Jane-Ellen Mathews (Doris Davenport), the outspoken daughter of a homesteader who opposes Bean and his idea of frontier justice.
Goldwyn intended The Westerner to be a quickie project, rushing it into production partly to take advantage of the popularity of Stagecoach and partly because, owing to his ongoing distribution battle with United Artists, he needed a success. As studio head, he hoped the combination of his star director and his star contract player, Gary Cooper, would turn the property into a moneymaker.
Goldwyn bought a story and treatment (dated May 12, 1939) from Stuart N. Lake, which was tentatively titled Vinegarroon, after the town where Bean had settled and set up his court. Niven Busch said of the treatment, “There was really only a slim tracing of story and no character for Cooper at all.”12 In actuality, Lake's story was well fleshed out and detailed—although much of it was eventually jettisoned—and it featured a substantial role for Cooper. However, Goldwyn faced some legal haggling over the rights to the story of Roy Bean. Darryl F. Zanuck wrote to him in July and claimed that he owned the rights to a book, The Law West of the Pecos by Everett Lloyd, and had been “dickering with MGM who wanted to buy it for Wallace Beery…. I have an entire script on the subject and I have a considerable amount invested in it.” Zanuck informed Goldwyn that Lake knew of the story and had asked several times to work on it, and then he made an offer: “If you are actually going ahead with the picture, I will be perfectly willing to sell you the rights that we own for exactly what they stand us.”13
Goldwyn immediately contacted Lake, complaining that he should not have accepted his money if he knew that Zanuck was working on the same story. Lake sent Goldwyn a detailed reply, pointing out that the first copyright recorded on the Roy Bean saga was a story he had published in the Saturday Evening Post on February 7, 1931. Lake further stated that Zanuck had contacted him about using this story as a vehicle for Will Rogers in March 1931, but Rogers had expressed no interest. In addition, Lake noted that Zanuck had filed his intent to make The Law West of the Pecos with the Hays office in 1933 and that Lloyd's book had been published and copyrighted in May 1931, three months after his own story had appeared in the Post.14
The issue must have been resolved in Goldwyn's favor, because in August he told Zanuck that he could not loan him Walter Brennan for The Grapes of Wrath because the actor was working on “the Judge Roy Bean story.”15 Meanwhile, Goldwyn also learned that his favorite screenwriter, Lillian Hellman, was “very disappointed in Vinegarroon” and “not interested in the Judge Bean character.”16 Oliver La Farge was also consulted, but he thought the story made Bean too comic and trivial a figure. La Farge believed that Bean was a man with a vision who knew that outlaws needed to be expelled from the Pecos territory and law established before the coming of the railroad. He wrote, “Some distinction clings to him for all his roughness.”17
Lake's original story provides an elaborate backstory for protagonist Steve Randall, who becomes Cole Hardin in the film. Randall is a glamorous figure who lives on Fifth Avenue in New York City in the 1880s and is the son of a senator who played a pivotal role in ousting Boss Tweed. Steve himself is more of a sportsman and a ladies’ man. When we meet him, he is courting Lydia Lyndow, the “Damask Rose,” a ballerina from Europe who is one of the most famous beauties in the history of the theater and is currently on a tour of America. Steve meets Lydia when her carriage is hijacked as she rides through Central Park; he slows down the horses and takes control of the carriage. (This incident is used in later drafts of the script to introduce Lillie Langtry.)
This eastern story alternates with what is happening out west, until the two narrative strands finally merge. Lake writes that the territory west of the Pecos River harbors many criminals, including some from the East who have taken refuge there to avoid extradition. One of these men is Dapper Dan McClosky, a fugitive from Boss Tweed who was sent there by Randall's father. Now head of a western gang, he prospers by turning stolen goods into cash. Roy Bean is the law in Vinegarroon, as well as a saloon owner who is anxious to take advantage of whatever new business will be generated once the railroad comes through. He, too, is in love with Lydia Lyndow, even though she is “as unattainable as the stars.” Also introduced is Blanche Colton, an “authentic young woman of the frontier” who runs the local eating-house with her mother.
As the story progresses, Steve is framed for murder by Dan McClosky's brother. Not wanting to disgrace his father, he escapes from New York and heads to the territory west of the Pecos. There, he is accused of stealing a horse and is brought before Judge Bean, whose courtroom/bar is decorated with pictures of Lydia Lyndow. Having read about Steve and Lydia in the paper, however, Bean suspends his sentence. Steve begins to work for Bean, bringing criminals to justice. Meanwhile, b
ack in New York, a friend of Steve's has informed Lydia that Steve is innocent of the murder charge that caused him to flee.
When the railroad comes to Vinegarroon, Bean leaves Steve in charge when he goes to attend a performance that Lydia is giving on her tour of the West. This substitution lays the groundwork for the evolving love story between Steve and Blanche Colton, who will tend to him when he is wounded in an attack by the McClosky gang. When Bean returns, he renames the town Lydia and his bar the Damask Rose.
Lydia decides to visit the town that is now named for her and offers to give a performance there. She tries to resurrect her relationship with Steve, asking him to return to New York with her and promising to marry him when her tour is over. Steve refuses, telling her that he has obligations to Bean and the town.
McClosky uses Lydia's concert as a cover to attack the town again. Blanche protects Lydia during the battle, during which Bean is shot. After McClosky surrenders, Bean orders Steve to hang the man and then dies while he stares at Lydia for the last time. At Bean's funeral, Steve informs Lydia that he belongs in the West, remarking, “This country burns its own brand,” and stating, “I never thought I could come to love such an unlovely land.” Recognizing that Steve has transferred his affections to Blanche as well, Lydia bids them farewell, and the last scene is of Steve and Blanche holding hands as they walk up the road.
Lake's revised treatment makes some important changes. Steve is still forced to leave New York because of a trumped-up murder charge, but not before expressing an interest in going out west, where his father owns a ranch. He tells his father that he is sick of New York and wants to “help make a new country, rather than try to make over an old one.”18 Bart McClosky is still the villain, but in this second version, he sells Steve a stolen horse, hoping that Bean will hang him. One of McClosky's hired guns, whom Steve eventually kills, is named Cole Hardin—which would become the name of the hero in the finished film. Here, it is Hardin's shooting that gets Steve arrested in neighboring Jacktown, where McClosky runs things, and with the help of some deputies, he escapes a plot to kill him. In this version, Bean is the protector of Blanche and her mother, whose ranch was destroyed when rustlers killed Blanche's father. At the end of this treatment, Bean makes Steve his successor. Texas Rangers, who have been sent to make Bean a real judge, appoint Steve instead, who stipulates that he wants McClosky and his associates sent back to New York. The treatment concludes with Steve proposing to Blanche.
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