William Wyler

by Gabriel Miller

  Wyler also effectively uses Leslie's lace-making as a device to embody her frustration at having to restrain her sexual desires and passions to maintain her social position as the wife of a planter. (Both Catherine Earnshaw and Catherine Sloper are shown embroidering in the same way, and for the same reasons.) The film's final image is of Leslie's lace fluttering in the breeze in her room as the moonlight streams through the slats, illuminating the floor beside it. The eerie effect of this image is anticipated in a scene in which Leslie meets her murdered lover's Eurasian widow (Gale Sondergaard) in a darkly lit establishment in the Chinese section of the city. Wyler emphasizes its Byzantine alleyways and air of mystery, and Leslie attempts to disguise herself by wearing a lace head covering, which the widow asks her to remove. In one of the scenes in that sequence, Leslie's head, covered by the lace shawl, is shown in three-quarter profile against a latticed, lighted window.

  The opening tracking shot of the film is justifiably famous, as Wyler's camera slips past some sleeping natives, past the Crosbie house, and up the front porch. Suddenly, a shot is heard, a cockatoo in the foreground flies off, and a man stumbles out of the house onto the porch. A woman exits the house and shoots at him with a handgun. She then fires four more times as the camera tracks to her face, revealing a cold, hard expression that veers toward contempt. This sequence, opening with a shot of the moon and without any dialogue, fully captures the world of Maugham's play. Wyler's skill at manipulating space—this time, within what seems like a single shot (it is actually two)—effectively introduces the multiple worlds of the film and its various planes of meaning. (This sequence was Wyler's invention; it has no basis in the script, which begins with shots of Malay boys working the rubber trees and the sound of axes.)

  Wyler would repeat the effect at the end of the film, whose closing scenes produced a certain amount of controversy between Bette Davis and the director. Leslie's final confrontation with her husband, Robert (Herbert Marshall, who had played the lover Hammond in the 1929 version), begins when he enters their bedroom. The shadows from the blinds cross him, prefiguring the end of their marriage, and Leslie confesses, “With all my heart, I still love the man I killed.” She is telling her husband that she can no longer endure their marriage and that murdering Hammond has not killed her desire for him. Davis said, “I couldn't conceive of any woman looking into her husband's eyes and admitting such a thing. I felt it would come out of her unbeknownst to herself, and therefore she would not be looking at him.”43 Wyler disagreed: “If she turns away from him, she just lessens the impact, and she's ashamed to admit it. But if she says it to him in a desperate moment of honesty and self-flagellation, then, it seemed to me, it hits him twice as hard and it's a terrible confession to make. You can't say that looking away.”44 Davis walked off the set but eventually relented: “I did it his way. It played validly, heaven knows, but to this day I think my way was the right way. I lost, but I lost to an artist.”45

  After this confrontation, Leslie walks toward the back door, whose windows are covered by blinds. Opening the door, she faces a lush outdoor world filled with exotic plants—the contrast is startling. As Leslie walks through this garden area, preceded by her shadow, she sees the moon go behind the clouds, and the screen goes dark. She continues until she comes face-to-face with Mrs. Hammond, flanked by a male companion; he holds Leslie while the widow stabs her. As they attempt to walk away, they are stopped by two policemen. The moon comes out as Wyler's camera pans to Leslie's body and cranes up a wall into the Crosbie house, where, from a distance, party guests are seen dancing, framed in the doorway. The camera then pans to Leslie's room, settling on her lace and the final shot of the moon.

  Wyler's expressionist ending thus emphasizes Leslie's retreat into her world of romance and fantasy, which can be realized only in death—another of the moon's meanings. Ultimately, the only way for Leslie to achieve her desires, which transcend the world she lives in, is to leave that world. Wyler's constricted image of the party and the shot of Leslie's abandoned lace seem to have the final word until he cuts to the moon one last time.

  Wyler's original conception of the final sequence was more poetic. Koch remembered: “The way Wyler directed it, the actual stabbing was left to the audience's imagination. As she walked out into the garden toward the avenging knife, a slight wind brushed her white scarf. The ghostly figure seemed to dissolve into the moonlight as though her dead lover had reclaimed her.”46

  Wyler was forced to add the more prosaic killing of Leslie and the arrest of Mrs. Hammond and her accomplice to satisfy the Breen office. When Warner Brothers first considered buying the film rights in 1938, the Breen office rejected the story because it presented “adultery without compensating moral values” and an unpunished murder brought about by a perversion of justice.47 Wyler noted that everyone had to be punished: “Even the Eurasian widow somehow had to be punished. We had to put in two cops to apprehend her. That was silly but we had to do it.”48 Although The Letter's conclusion is compromised by this mundane pantomime of justice, it is interesting that both films Wyler made for Warner Brothers end on dark and brutal notes. Without Goldwyn and his insistence on happy endings, Wyler could shape his material in a way that more closely reflected his vision.

  9

  Bette Davis and the South Redux

  The Little Foxes (1941)

  Goldwyn's studio was virtually shut down by the summer of 1940 as a result of a lawsuit over distribution rights with United Artists. The only film he had in development was an adaptation of Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes, which he would refer to for most of his life as “The Three Little Foxes.” He had purchased the rights to the hit play in 1939, despite warnings from one employee that it “deals with terribly greedy unpleasant people.”1 His story editor, Edwin Knopf, reiterated that judgment and added that the story was “too caustic for films.”2 Goldwyn reportedly snapped back, “I don't give a damn how much it costs. Buy it.”3

  Wyler expected that he would be directing The Little Foxes when Goldwyn resumed production. In the meantime, he was loaned out again, this time to Twentieth Century–Fox, whose production head, Darryl F. Zanuck, had long admired Wyler. Zanuck wanted to make another prestige property as a follow-up to John Ford's successful film adaptation of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Because Ford was busy with another project, Zanuck chose Wyler to direct the film version of Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley, for which he had paid the astounding sum of $300,000.

  Zanuck commissioned a script from Ernest Pascal and then asked Philip Dunne (Stanley and Livingstone, Johnny Apollo) to rewrite it. In his autobiography, Dunne characterizes the script as “long, turgid, and ugly.”4 When he wrote to Zanuck and asked why he had bought the rights in the first place, Zanuck sent him a copy of the novel, which Dunne found to be full of “warmth, love, nobility, and earthy humor.”5 It tells the story of Welsh coal miners whose valley is destroyed by industrial pollution, but above all, it is about a proud, self-reliant family that is divided over the right to strike. Dunne enthusiastically accepted the assignment but told Zanuck that because the novel had so much worthwhile material, he would have trouble cutting it to a manageable size. Gone with the Wind, at four hours long, was then the largest grossing film in the country, so Zanuck gave Dunne the go-ahead to write a four-hour film.

  When Zanuck received Dunne's script, he pronounced it “twice too long.” Wyler came on board shortly thereafter, and his first job was to help Dunne make cuts. Dunne was thrilled to have Wyler as a collaborator (they had been friends since Wyler's marriage to Margaret Sullavan). Dunne's political bent was decidedly left wing, and he considered Wyler a fellow liberal and progressive who would be sympathetic to his pro-union approach to the story. In 1940, a union's right to organize was still a hotly contested issue in the United States. Screenwriters like Dunne were fighting for recognition of the Screen Writers’ Guild, to which Zanuck was opposed. Dunne refused to write an anti-union script, but he knew Zanuck wou
ld never approve a militantly pro-union one. He wrote, “I proposed a sort of compromise: let the preacher…who in the earlier version was a fire-eating socialist, decide the family dispute by coming down firmly in favor of the union, but with the proviso that the young unionists accept full responsibility for their actions.”6

  Wyler persuaded Zanuck to pay for a two-week trip to a mountain resort, where he and Dunne worked on revising the script. They succeeded in cutting parts of it, but in the process, they added two pages for every one they cut. By the time they returned to Los Angeles, the script was even longer than before. In the meantime, casting had begun, and a Welsh mining village was being built in the Malibu hills. Dunne and Wyler spent ten more weeks working on the script. Dunne remembered, “I would shout in aggravation, ‘What is wrong with the god damn scene?’ And he would merely say, ‘You could do it better’—and eventually I always could.”7

  The major problem the scriptwriters faced was trying to tell the entire life story of the protagonist, Huw, as he looked back on his childhood. The solution came when Wyler discovered a new child actor who had recently arrived in America. A certain Mrs. McDowall had contacted an agent to represent her son, Roddy. The boy was sent to MGM to test for The Yearling but was not right for that part, so he was sent to Fox to test for How Green Was My Valley. The casting director was reluctant to show McDowall's test to Wyler, however, claiming that the boy was “bowlegged and walleyed. He has a gap in his teeth, and he's ugly.”8 Wyler insisted on seeing the test anyway and knew immediately that he had found his Huw. McDowall's casting clarified the story arc in Wyler's mind. Believing that McDowall was a captivating enough actor to carry the film, he decided that Huw need not grow up—the film would deal with only the first half of the novel. (Similar abridgments had been made in the film versions of Come and Get It and Wuthering Heights.) This solution pleased both Dunne and Zanuck, as the latter was growing weary with all the delays.

  Wyler's contract with Fox was for only fourteen weeks, and time was already running short. If he could not get an extension from Goldwyn, filming might have to be postponed. Wyler's difficulties were solved, however, when Fox's New York office pulled the plug on the film. Dunne blamed the studio heads, not Zanuck, for the film's temporary suspension. He wrote that they “hated the script, hated the absence of real starring roles, hated Willy's reputation as an extravagant director, predicted disaster for the entire project, and refused to put up the money for it.”9 Some months later, John Ford agreed to direct the film and bring it in for $1 million. On those terms, the New York office was willing to green-light the film.

  Wyler always regretted not making How Green Was My Valley. In many respects, the film was his; he had worked on the script and the sets and had done much of the casting, including discovering Roddy McDowall, which he was always proud of. The film also represented his liberal political views and dealt with the kinds of social themes that interested him. Ironically, Wyler would lose out to Ford as Best Director at the 1941 Academy Awards, and in the Best Picture category, How Green Was My Valley won over both The Little Foxes and Citizen Kane.

  Once his involvement with How Green Was My Valley ended, Wyler returned to Goldwyn to direct The Little Foxes. Hellman was having trouble turning her play into a film, and by January 1941, she still did not have a satisfactory script. Since she was in New York revising her newest play, Watch on the Rhine, and had no time to work on further revisions, she recommended to Goldwyn three people she trusted to produce a script that would not tamper with the basic structure and plot of her play: her former husband, Arthur Kober (to whom the play is dedicated); her close friend Dorothy Parker; and Parker's husband, Alan Campbell. Goldwyn hired all three.

  Hellman had started work on the screenplay in 1939, the year the play opened on Broadway. The play's title, suggested by Dorothy Parker, comes from the Song of Solomon (2:15): “Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines, for our vines have tender grapes.” The foxes who are destroying the land of the South are represented by the Hubbards, the family at the center of the play. The play's action takes place in the spring of 1900 in a small town in the Deep South. Industry is beginning to rise in the South, and the region's entrepreneurs are trying to compete with New England and other locales. The role of the Industrial Revolution in shaping America provides both setting and theme for a number of Wyler films, including Dodsworth, Come and Get It, and The Westerner (in its original conception, The Westerner dealt with the coming of the railroad). Industrialization also forms the backdrop of How Green Was My Valley, and Preston Dillard speaks of it in Jezebel as a challenge the South must come to grips with if it is to compete with the North. As in The Children's Hour, however, Hellman is less interested in analyzing this social background than in showing how the values inculcated by this system affect the interactions of the family.

  The story concerns Regina Giddens and her brothers Oscar and Ben Hubbard, who are planning to build a cotton factory in partnership with Chicago businessman William Marshall. Regina's husband, Horace, who is being treated for a heart ailment at Johns Hopkins, is also involved in the deal and is supposed to put up a third of the money. When the brothers pressure Regina to turn over the funds, she sends her daughter, Alexandra (Zan), to Baltimore to bring her father home. Meanwhile, she bargains with her brothers for a larger share of the business. Ben wants this to come out of Oscar's share, and when Oscar objects, Ben assures him that he will get the money back when Zan marries Oscar's son Leo.

  When Horace comes home, he refuses to give Regina the money. So the brothers conspire, behind Regina's back, to have Leo, who works in Horace's bank, steal Horace's railroad bonds from his safe-deposit box, which they will then use as collateral for the loan from Marshall. Horace discovers the theft but prevents Regina from gaining the upper hand in this sibling intrigue by telling her that he will claim he lent her brothers the bonds. Then, in his will, he will leave Regina only the bonds, and the rest of his estate will go to Zan. Regina taunts Horace, causing him to have a heart attack, and she lets him die by refusing to help him get his medicine. She then confronts her brothers about the theft and blackmails them into giving her the lion's share of the business. She apparently wins, but by the end of the play, Zan voices her suspicions about her father's death, and Ben realizes that Regina is vulnerable. Zan tells her mother that she is leaving, and Regina is seen ascending the stairs alone at the end of the play.

  The Little Foxes is generally considered to be Hellman's finest play. It is certainly her most often revived work. It is also her last work produced in the 1930s, the decade that shaped her politics, and it offers her most focused dissection of the historical roots and internal forces behind the failure of capitalism. However, the play is not as tendentious as it sounds. It is filled with Hellman's best theatrical writing and populated by characters who are funny, ironic, sad, and aware of their own personas. Like The Children's Hour, it leans toward melodrama, but like any great work, it finally transcends category—particularly in Hellman's refusal to tie things together at the end of the play. She deliberately leaves the “solution” of the family crisis to the imagination of her audience.

  The Hubbards are a rapacious and materialistic family whose members view even the most elemental family bonds as commodities that can be manipulated and used as tools for negotiation, blackmail, or even murder. Every family relationship has its price or value. Regina is willing to consider marrying off her daughter to her nephew Leo if it will help grease the business deal she has negotiated with her brothers. Oscar and Ben are complicit in encouraging Leo to steal his uncle Horace's bonds and thus seal their arrangement with Marshall. Regina is even willing to sit idly by and watch her husband die when she finds out that Horace intends to significantly cut her inheritance in his soon-to-be-revised will.

  The modus operandi of the Hubbards is self-interest. The play's central conflict is not so much how this noxious family will destroy the weaker and more decent people around them but whi
ch of them will outfox the others. Each family member is continually trying to take advantage of the others, and Hellman constructs the play largely around a series of situations in which one or more of the siblings attempt to outmaneuver another—whether it is Regina versus Ben (the wiliest ones), Ben versus Oscar, Oscar versus Regina, or the two brothers versus their sister.

  Hellman also borrows a major thematic element from Chekhov: the societal transition from an agrarian culture, with its decorous, mannered lifestyle, to a more modern industrial-technological milieu whose ways are coarse, materialistic, and ruthless. During their dinner with Marshall, Ben differentiates the Hubbards from the “aristocrats,” who “have not kept together and have not kept what belonged to them.” He goes on to say that the aristocrat “can adapt himself to nothing,” while people like the Hubbards “have learned the new ways and learned how to make them pay.”10 Like Chekhov, Hellman portrays the aristocrats, whom the “foxes” will trample, sympathetically. Horace Giddens, for one, refuses to invest in the cotton mill. In act 2, he tells Regina he will not participate in the exploitation of workers, which will be an inevitable by-product of this development, nor will he countenance the social misery that will surely be its legacy. Hellman's pro-union sympathies obviously come into play here in her exposure of the Hubbards’ venality; one of their central arguments in favor of building a mill in the South is the absence of unions and the consequent ability to exploit cheap labor. But Horace's values—and Hellman's—have no place in the Hubbards’ Darwinian world. They insist that they must heed the call of progress, or the region will die. The land and its values must be raped, like Chekhov's cherry orchard, if modernity is to be respected.