William Wyler

by Gabriel Miller

  Wyler cuts from the capture of the steer-killing farmer to a series of exterior shots of Bean's courthouse/bar as we hear his voice pronouncing the verdict for committing the worst crime west of the Pecos: “shooting a steer.” The condemned man is then seen in a medium shot with a noose around his neck—the juxtaposition is jarring. The prisoner pleads for mercy, claiming that he shot the steer by accident. The first view of Bean is also a medium shot, isolating him in the frame; he blames the prisoner for not being able to shoot straight, prays for his soul, and then kicks the horse out from under him. There is a cut to the prisoner's silhouette as he dangles from the noose and then another of Bean fingering the dead man's money—confiscating the property of the dead accounts for a substantial part of his income.

  This painful image is juxtaposed with a shot of the embalmer/dentist abandoning a patient so that he can go and collect the new body. He changes the sign on his door to “Funeral/Back Later” as he hurriedly leaves. Having broken the darkly ironic mood of the hanging with this brief comic moment, Wyler follows up with a cut to the townsfolk gathered to drink at Bean's bar, where the judge toasts Lillie Langtry as “the fairest flower that ever bloomed.” This association between Bean's “dream,” which remains linked to the past, and the notion of a blooming flower—a symbol of the future of the West—is his blind spot and will ultimately doom him. (In fact, when the real Lillie finally visited Langtry, Texas, in 1903, Bean was already dead from the effects of drinking.) The man he has just hanged is a harbinger of what will turn the wilderness into a garden, and the irony of this thematic concurrence is enforced when Wyler cuts from Bean's toast to the arrival of the undertaker's hearse.

  This highly problematic introduction of Bean is followed by the entrance of Cole Hardin, who is led into Vinegarroon on his horse, with his hands tied behind his back. We first see him framed by the rope used to hang the homesteader (Wyler repeats this image from Hell's Heroes); here, it forms a triangle, echoing the image that concludes Come and Get It. Cole is led into Bean's court and accused of stealing the horse he was riding, which belongs to Chickenfoot, an officer of the court. Bean calls his court into session by placing a Bible on the bar and a gun on the Bible, a composition that is emblematic of his form of justice. Informed that the penalty for horse theft is hanging, Cole is asked how he pleads, and he answers, “Innocent.” The horse is then brought into court, and when Chickenfoot asks the horse if it belongs to him, the horse nods its head up and down, and Bean rules that the horse does indeed belong to Chickenfoot. Cole does not dispute that fact but claims that he bought the horse from someone else. Wyler films these proceedings in tight group shots, making the small room seem even smaller.

  Cole's trial is interrupted by Jane-Ellen Mathews, who stands up to Bean, disputes his credentials as a judge, and mocks his notion of justice. Admiring her moxie, Bean declares that if not for Lillie, he would marry Jane-Ellen. Cole can see that he is in trouble, and Cooper plays him as a shrewd, calculating charmer. When the jury retires to consider the verdict with a bottle of the judge's “rub of the brush,” Wyler repeats his undertaker/dentist joke—the sign on the room is changed from “Table Stakes” to “Jury Room.” The humor of this action, in conjunction with the heroic persona of Gary Cooper, who shows no fear, is an indication that nothing serious is going to happen to Cole. Having noticed the pictures of Lillie on the wall, Cole begins to rhapsodize about her beauty. He claims to know her and asserts that he owns a lock of her hair. The jury then returns a guilty verdict, but Bean suspends the sentence in the hope of getting that lock of hair from Cole. Meanwhile, the actual horse thief enters the bar, Cole recognizes him, and they fight; eventually, Cole knocks him out and takes the $60 he paid for the horse from the fallen man's pocket. When the thief recovers and pulls a gun, Bean shoots him. This exchange becomes the basis of the two protagonists’ friendship.

  Cole Hardin is not a typical western hero. There is no indication that he is proficient with a gun, and he shows no propensity toward violence. (In that regard, he anticipates Jim McKay in The Big Country.) His survival skills seem to consist of caution and thoughtfulness and the ability to match wits with the sly, manipulative Roy Bean. When he finally shoots it out with Bean at the Fort Davis Opera House, he prevails not because of any superior skill with a gun but mostly because of luck. Cole is, in Robert Warshow's words, “a man of leisure.”37 When he is questioned by Bean, he admits to being “from nowhere in particular” and having no specific destination, although he later confesses that he wants to go to California. He is essentially a saddle bum, a man without a home or a family. His spur-of-the-moment decision to work for the Mathews family is apparently based not on the need for money but on his attraction to Jane-Ellen and his instinctive sympathy for the homesteaders’ cause.

  The growth of the relationship between Cole and Bean dominates the first part of the film. After the shooting of the real horse thief, Cole and Bean spend the rest of the day trying to outdrink each other. Wyler shows them sleeping together the next morning, Bean's arm around Cole, introducing a brief note of homoeroticism.38 When he awakes, Cole washes up and tries to check his appearance in a mirror covered with pictures of Lillie. Cole's vanity—he repeats this gesture several times—coupled with the plentiful evidence of Bean's obsession, makes for more comedy. When Cole rides out of town, however, he again passes the hanging noose and then a graveyard. Those images are juxtaposed with that of Bean standing at the bar with the pictures of Lillie behind him, again linking the looming death motif with Bean's seemingly comic fixation. Then, suddenly remembering Cole's claim to have a lock of Lillie's hair, Bean rides after him, eventually knocking them both off their horses. The shot of Bean and Cole crawling in the dirt while the judge reminds his friend of his promise to deliver the lock of hair is one of the film's comic high points.

  The second plot involves Cole's romance with Jane-Ellen, the daughter of one of the homesteaders, and his growing involvement in their cause. His arrival at the Mathews house is given a comic touch as well. It is night, and Toland utilizes firelight that flickers light and shadows on the wall of the house, projecting an element of beauty onto what is otherwise a drab setting. Jane-Ellen tells her father about the stranger she met earlier that day, who she thinks was certainly hanged. “I kept on seeing his face all day,” she says. Then, as she carries a lighted match to a lantern, she sees Cole's eyes through the window. She is startled, but the coincidence is funny.39 Cole walks in and says he has stopped by to thank her for her help earlier in the day. More comic business follows, as her father urges Jane-Ellen to play up to Cole and romance him. (Mathews actually has a practical reason for wanting his daughter to ensnare this fellow, since most of his farmhands have been frightened away by Bean's men, and Mathews needs help harvesting the corn.)

  Some of the homesteaders want to ride into Vinegarroon to lynch Bean. Getting wind of their plan, Cole rides ahead to warn the judge; then he succeeds in disarming the farmers and tries to negotiate a truce. First, he presents the cattlemen's viewpoint—namely, that the cattlemen had the land first, and the homesteaders often cultivated the land for only a year before their crops failed: “So the homesteaders moved out and the thistle and gypsum moved in. The land was no good for men or cattle.” Bean interrupts at this point, agrees with Cole, and throws the homesteaders out of the bar. Cole, however, continues the argument with Bean, insisting that the homesteaders “have a right to defend their homesteads…. When you make war on them, you make war on their women and children too.” He urges Bean to be a “real judge for all the people.”

  Traditionally in westerns, the new moral order (or the rule of law) is dependent on the violent intervention of the western hero. But Wyler's film veers away from the traditional formula—its hero is not portrayed as a violent man or even a gunman. (In early drafts, Cole is an easterner who doesn't even know how to use a gun; in a later version, he is taught to shoot by Jane-Ellen!) The Westerner is, furthermore, the first important western to u
se the homesteader versus cattleman plot (which famously figures in Shane and, much later, in Heaven's Gate), and Cole's defense of the homesteaders introduces a concept that would become a standard motif of the genre. Women would come to represent the Christian moral order of civilization, their presence in the western landscape denoting a decisive step forward from the male rule of violence that is clearly depicted here by the cattlemen and the “rulin's” of Bean's court.

  When Cole finally guns down this defender of the old order at the end of the film, it is because Bean has broken his word to him. Following Cole's presentation of the homesteaders’ case, Bean is less interested in that argument than in securing the lock of Lillie's hair that Cole claims to possess. Cole offers to give it to him if Bean and his men will remove all the stray cattle from the homesteaders’ land, and Bean agrees to do so. Cole, however, has to come up with a lock of hair, so he tricks Jane-Ellen into letting him cut off a lock of hers. Bean rounds up the cattle and gets what he thinks is Lillie's hair in return.

  The homesteaders celebrate their harvest with festivities, including a dance, where an American flag is seen in the corner. Here, Wyler offers some of his most evocative images of nature and the transformation of the wilderness. He shows the settlers kneeling before the cornfields and being led in prayer by Caliphet Mathews (Jane-Ellen's father), whose voice is heard as Wyler cuts to various views of the fields and the land bathed in the beauty of Toland's black-and-white–streaked Sky. Mathews intones, “The land that was desolate has become like a garden.”

  Wyler cuts away to Cole and Jane-Ellen. She is showing him what she considers the most beautiful parcel of the land in the area—a perfect place for a home. Cole seems more receptive to the notion of a home than he was earlier, even telling Jane-Ellen how to build one. As they kiss, however, Wyler cuts to a fire in the distance. The homesteaders’ dream is being destroyed; Mathews will soon be killed and his home destroyed. Wyler's quick cuts showing the devastation of the land are as effective as the earlier pastoral views. Shocked and hurt, Cole confronts Bean and forces him to admit that he is responsible for the fire. Cole promises to stop him and goes to Fort Davis to have himself deputized. In the meantime, Bean has changed the name of Vinegarroon to Langtry—a place for cattlemen. His announcement is greeted by gunfire, not prayer.

  The final showdown, as noted earlier, takes place in the theater where Lillie is set to perform. Bean has bought all the tickets, and he is the only one in the audience. Before the curtain rises, Wyler's camera cranes up, isolating Bean in the theater. The illusory world he is anticipating is then shattered when he sees Cole onstage instead of Lillie. A gun battle ensues, and Bean is wounded. In a last gesture of friendship, Cole helps him backstage to meet Lillie, who appears like a vision to him in a tiara and a white dress. All he can say is, “I'm pleased to meet ya,” as the vision fades and he dies.

  In the background of this affecting scene is heard “Do You Remember Sweet Betsy from Pike”—a traditional mid-nineteenth-century song by an unknown composer detailing the travails of a man and his sweetheart. Betsy and Ike cross the country and the desert, suffering multiple hardships. Finally reaching their destination, they attend a dance, where Ike asks Betsy, “You're an angel, but where are your wings?” They marry, but Ike soon becomes jealous and wants a divorce, and Betsy is happy to see him leave. The song celebrates a love that endures many hardships but ultimately fails. Bean, in contrast, is allowed to die happy, holding on to his illusion of Lillie, but his town for cattlemen will be trampled by historical necessity. The film's closing scene shows Cole and Jane-Ellen in their home, presumably married, as they watch a wagonload of settlers returning to the land. A map of Texas is displayed prominently on their wall, and the final image is a field of wheat in full bloom.

  The Westerner is an unbalanced film whose numerous script revisions never arrived at a clear conception of the Cole Hardin character. Over the course of multiple revisions, his past was eliminated and few character lines were filled in. Cooper was right to object to playing such a slight character, although he managed to give a fine, strong performance. Bean, in contrast, is a superbly realized character, and Brennan played him to the hilt. Although the judge is in most respects a despicable character, Brennan made him likable. Even when he deceives Cole and burns out the homesteaders, the actor brings such poignancy to Bean's dying moments—the way he tucks his hand into his uniform, the bravery he wants to show Lillie, the look of adoration in his eyes—that the audience sympathizes with him at the end. (Contrast this performance with his Pa Clanton in My Darling Clementine, a wholly evil man who elicits no sympathy.) The imbalance in the relationship between the two male leads is matched by the film's failure to realize the character of Jane-Ellen, which is not helped by Doris Davenport's overly aggressive performance, or to persuasively present the homesteaders’ viewpoint.

  In consequence, the film really belongs to Judge Roy Bean, and this muddles it thematically. Wyler softens this man's murderous, antisocial side by focusing on his affection for Cole and his outsized obsession with Lillie. But Bean's desire for power is pathological, and his desire for Lillie should be more effectively implicated in his madness; that his obsession is presented comically and even indulgently undercuts the film's social message, which should be carried by Cole and Jane-Ellen. The heroine's struggles against what Bean represents and her determination to save and work her land are meant to symbolize the triumph of civilization and American progress, but both her marriage to Cole and the western movement of the wagons offer no more than lip service to these ideals. The film makes a stronger case for Cole's love for Bean.

  Wyler's direction is also patchy. Despite the fact that he cut his teeth on westerns, he seems more comfortable indoors than out. The scenes inside Bean's courthouse are effectively staged and handled, but many of the outdoor sequences—especially the fights and the scenes of the homesteaders riding toward Vinegarroon with Cole in pursuit—look clumsy, and the editing is awkward. Wyler commented that he was attracted to the interplay between Bean and Cole, and frankly, he seems to have been bored by other aspects of the story.

  Nonetheless, the film was given a spectacular send-off. The premiere in Fort Worth was tied to a charity show hosted by Bob Hope. A rodeo-style parade through town was attended by Wyler and his wife Talli, Gary Cooper, and other Hollywood celebrities. More than 300,000 people lined the streets to watch the festivities. The film earned Stuart Lake an Oscar nomination for his original story, and Walter Brennan won as Best Supporting Actor, even though his was the starring performance.

  The Westerner was bookended by Wyler's two most stylized films, Wuthering Heights and The Letter. The latter was also released in 1940 and, like Jezebel, was made for Warner Brothers. The Letter also reunited Wyler with Better Davis, who gave another outstanding performance and earned her second Oscar nomination under Wyler's guidance. It was Wyler's fifth film in five years to earn a Best Picture nomination, and it was the third time in five years that he was nominated as Best Director.

  The Letter, like most of Wyler's recent efforts, was adapted from a play. This one, by W. Somerset Maugham, had opened in London in 1927 starring Gladys Cooper and on Broadway in 1929 with Katharine Cornell. (Also in 1929, Paramount released a film version starring Jeanne Eagels, with Reginald Owen and Herbert Marshall.) The play is about Leslie Crosbie, the wife of an English plantation manager in Malaysia who murders her secret lover out of anger and jealousy and then uses her social position to hide the truth and claim self-defense. In filming this dark tale, Wyler again examines the themes of unfulfilled passion, social hypocrisy and compromise, and sexual tension. The Letter covers much the same ground as Wuthering Heights, but with more sophisticated and polished pictorial flourishes. Wyler sidesteps Maugham's broad psychological portraits, substituting atmospheric and exotic visual compositions.

  The film's central image, which recurs at various key moments in the film, is a full moon. It first appears at the beginning, when Lesl
ie shoots six bullets into her lover. Screenwriter Howard Koch told Jan Herman that Wyler felt something was missing from the script: “An image. Something to unify the story that isn't there now.” Koch suggested using the moon, which was already part of the opening, to represent “the woman's suppressed guilt behind the façade of her protested innocence.”40 The image undoubtedly meant even more than that to Wyler, which is why Koch's suggestion seized his imagination.

  Leslie Crosbie, like Catherine Earnshaw and other Wyler protagonists, is stifled by a society that cannot contain her passions. She feels trapped in her marriage to a sweet but dull businessman (an Edgar Linton–like character) who loves her but can never satisfy the deeper yearnings and unfulfilled aspirations the moon represents. Romantic poets often employed the moon as a symbol of poetic reverie and heightened imaginative consciousness. William Wordsworth's “A Night Piece,” for instance, offers a poetic example of the moon providing a glimpse of the infinite:

  He looks up—the clouds are split

  Asunder—and above his head he sees

  The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens.

  There in the black-blue vault she sails along,

  Followed by multitudes of stars.

  Wyler and cameraman Tony Gaudio strive to capture this image in their portraits of the moon, featuring every detail the poet describes (except the stars). The photography is so evocative that one can even see the blue.

  Wyler extends the symbolic qualities of this image even further. Using lowered blinds on the windows, Wyler casts the moonlight on Leslie as though, in Koch's words, he is “printing prison stripes on her dress”41—suggesting both her imprisonment within herself and her guilt over the murder. Mimicking techniques from German Expressionism, Wyler's dramatic application of this shadowed effect from the blinds anticipates their use in film noir, where they became a stylistic hallmark. Also, although the film feels as if it takes place almost entirely at night, Wyler carefully alternates light and dark spaces to illuminate the dual aspects of his heroine's personality. Charles Affron notes, “The audience of The Letter is caught in a visual inquiry, its characters in a moral and legal one. The clash between the image's clarity and the situation's ambiguity is rendered by Davis and Wyler.”42