William Wyler

by Gabriel Miller

  As indicated in a letter he wrote to the Goetzes,13 both Wyler and his screenwriters were familiar with the adaptation of Sister Carrie that Clifford Odets had written for RKO in 1944. As he often did, Odets had reconceived Dreiser's story, establishing Carrie as a determined and ambitious woman in the first sequences. His script opens with the death of Carrie's mother, who is described as the family's breadwinner, while Mr. Meeber is presented as a shiftless, lazy man. (Odets's plays are full of strong mothers and weak fathers.) Before Carrie leaves for Chicago, her mother's former employer (a man of means) proposes marriage, but she refuses. Carrie seems determined to move to the city and make something of herself.

  Odets also places more emphasis on Carrie's relationship with her sister's family and her courtship by Drouet. Most important, her interest in the theater is established early on, and Odets gives her an important speech in which she articulates her theory of a more realistic style of acting (Carrie as a forerunner of the Group Theatre?) than the heavily theatrical style she has observed at shows attended with Drouet. One of Odets's most audacious changes is transforming Moy, one of the owners of Fitzgerald and Moy's, the bar/restaurant that Hurstwood manages, into a central figure in the story. Here, he becomes Julia Hurstwood's father as well. Moy admires (and pities) his son-in-law and despises his daughter—in her, he sees the reincarnation of her cold and heartless mother. Nevertheless, he helps his daughter get out of her marriage when, after hiring a detective to follow Hurstwood, he learns of his son-in-law's evolving relationship with Carrie. Despite fulfilling his fatherly obligation to his daughter, Moy is generous to Hurstwood, whom he considers integral to his business and largely responsible for its success. After Hurstwood steals the money and runs off with Carrie, Moy allows him to pay it back in installments and later offers him a partnership in the business if he agrees to leave Carrie. Because Odets's Hurstwood is better at finding jobs than his counterpart in Wyler's film, his decline seems more precipitous. He decides to leave Carrie to allow her to realize her ambitions, which she does by becoming a successful actress. Odets's script ends with Hurstwood killing himself by running into a burning building while Carrie is being courted by Ames, a writer. His death is thus balanced by her success and a blossoming relationship with someone her own age.14

  The Goetzes scrapped most of Odets's ideas and moved closer to the details of Dreiser's novel. What they retained, however, is the mutual devotion displayed by Hurstwood and Carrie. Odets understood that the film's characters needed to elicit the audience's sympathies in ways that the novel's did not. Dreiser's narrative is not really a love story, even though many of the events recounted resemble a tale of passion and romance. Carrie feels a certain affection for both Drouet and Hurstwood, but her heart never rules her self-interest. In fact, Dreiser's Carrie seems incompletely developed as a character. She simply falls under the sway of superhuman forces, while Hurstwood is the one who exhibits passion. When first introduced, he is at the summit of his career. Well liked and highly regarded, he socializes with the rich and powerful. He has everything to lose by becoming involved with Carrie, especially considering that she is drawn to his wealth and prestige and is not motivated by romance or love. Odets's characters are stronger and more determined, as well as warm and passionate. In his version, Carrie and Hurstwood risk a great deal for each other, and their love endures through the difficulties they experience.

  The Goetzes’ treatment contains summaries of many scenes that never made it into the final film.15 In a letter to Wyler, the screenwriters acknowledge that the treatment is too long (at fifty-two pages), but they note that writing it was a valuable exercise: “From your point of view, this is probably far too long but from ours, it has turned out to be a very useful thing to have done. It has given us the basis for every dramatizable point in the continuity.”16 Their treatment spends some time developing Carrie's interest in the theater, and it includes Carrie's debut at an amateur theatrical production at the Elks’ Lodge that is attended by Drouet and Hurstwood, a central scene in the novel. Virtually all these scenes were cut from the final script, however. Most important, the treatment devotes significant attention to Hurstwood's decline—including numerous scenes of his rejection for a variety of jobs, as well as his work as a strikebreaker—thus emphasizing his story at the expense of Carrie's.

  This imbalance has also been noted in criticism of the novel, where Dreiser certainly depicts Hurstwood's fall in long, detailed sequences that underscore the contrasting fates of the two main characters. Both are struggling to survive in a precarious, materialistic world, and while Hurstwood fails to move ahead, Carrie remains focused on success. As good fortune continues to elude him in New York, Hurstwood increasingly looks back on his lost prosperity and his life in Chicago, now forfeited in the vain pursuit of love. His descent offers a lesson in the fate of a dreamer whose hopes have been destroyed—in this respect, Hurstwood's story is a more extreme version of Catherine Sloper's. In stark contrast, Carrie's story, both in Dreiser's novel and, to a lesser extent, in the Goetzes’ treatment, provides an object lesson in success. Hers, however, is not the typical American success story, for Carrie triumphs despite her questionable virtue. There is no correlation in Dreiser's world between social morality and material success.

  Wyler, who always supervised the evolution of his scripts, was concerned about the amount of attention focused on Hurstwood in the second half of the treatment. In a detailed letter to the Goetzes, he itemized his suggestions for tightening the dramatic structure: “In the second part of the story, after the marriage in New York [in this scene, Hurstwood marries Carrie under the assumed name Wheeler; it was cut from the film], there is a need for further dramatization…. There is a narrative quality in the steady downhill progression of Hurstwood. Also, there is a repetitive quality about these scenes.” Wyler was also perceptive in his analysis of Hurstwood's character: “Hurstwood's downfall stems from his own weakness of character, which led him to run off with Carrie as he did. Without the flaw in his make-up, the blows struck at him by fate need not reduce him to the gas jet.” He went on to point out that demonstrating Hurstwood's flaw and dramatizing two key moments would ensure that “his total defeat as a human being is more understandable.” The first key moment involves “the loss of capital”—Wyler points to the incident in the book where Hurstwood invests in a saloon and loses his money through his partner's duplicity: “The reason this is a good situation is that for a man like Hurstwood, there is no future in a salaried job.” The second moment is the loss of Carrie, which occurs in two stages: first, “the loss of the sex relationship,” and then, her leaving him. Interestingly, of these suggestions by Wyler, only Carrie's leaving remains in the released film.17

  Wyler was equally sensitive to one of the central problems with the novel: “But from Carrie's point of view there is a real problem to dramatize. What does a woman do in such a case?…Carrie is decent, and feels a certain loyalty to Hurstwood…. It is a dreadful thing to do, to leave a man in such circumstances. But then consider her life. What is to become of her?” To clarify her dilemma, Wyler suggested adding the character of Ames—absent from the treatment, but featured in the novel—as someone who is “interested in Carrie and offering her a way out?” Carrie would reject him out of loyalty to Hurstwood, but also, she would recognize that if she went with him, “she would be repeating the near fatal mistakes of her life a third time.” This is the key for Wyler—showing that Carrie “has learned something. Just as we show Hurstwood's regression, we want to show some development in Carrie, her growth from a naïve country girl…to a mature woman, with an emotional greatness.”18 The Goetzes added Ames in one of their final drafts, only to cut him later, but Wyler's comment on Carrie's evolution remains interesting. Perhaps after depicting the maturation of Catherine Sloper—who, after acquiring knowledge of the world, rejects it—Wyler wanted to present a heroine whose education produces more positive results. However, the end of the film as released raises quest
ions about his final intentions.

  Wyler's film is more compact and streamlined than either the Goetzes’ treatment or their final screenplays. When Wyler began shooting on August 21, the script still retained scenes of Carrie's theatrical debut at the Elks’ Lodge; her marriage to Hurstwood in New York; her visit to Hurstwood at Slawson's and her perception of the place's shabbiness; Hurstwood's relief at the loss of the baby and Carrie's disgust with him; the introduction of Ames, who is now the director of a revue Carrie auditions for; her friendship with Lola, another actress; and Hurstwood's rejection from a series of jobs, in large part because of his age. Wyler eliminates all this detail to focus almost exclusively on the relationship between Hurstwood and Carrie and the impact of money on that relationship.

  The first part of the film moves rapidly. After bidding farewell to her parents at the train station in Columbia City, Missouri (a scene that has no counterpart in the novel), Carrie boards the train and meets Drouet (Eddie Albert), a traveling salesman who gives her his card. During their conversation, Carrie displays self-confidence when she informs Drouet, “I can be better than Minnie [her sister]. I went to school.” This boast is almost immediately followed by a shot of Carrie sewing in a shoe factory, where she is one of a long line of workers, laboring at a tedious job. Wyler's cut immediately establishes the economic reality of an America entering the modern age and undercuts Carrie's bold desire to make something of herself.

  She is next seen, her face framed by the opening between the sink and the dining area in her sister's apartment, complaining about her job and worrying that she will work for years and have nothing to show for it—again, Wyler's framing emphasizes the hopelessness of her position. In the next scene, Carrie is at her sewing machine again, and because of the bad light, she catches her finger in the machine and screams. She is paid off and told to come back when she has healed, but Carrie knows she is being fired. Her replacement stands right behind her and further back in the frame, and Wyler shows the other women bent over their machines, not stopping to watch her go.

  Although Dreiser's novel is, in part, a panorama of life in Chicago at the turn of the century, Wyler's is very much an indoor film. Almost all the early scenes are interior shots of the train, the factory, and Minnie's apartment. Wyler is less interested in re-creating an era than in evoking a mood, a state of mind, and a psychological atmosphere. This intention is realized a short time later when Carrie meets Drouet for dinner at Fitzgerald's. The scene outside is standard and uninteresting, but when Carrie walks through the door of the restaurant, Wyler's camera peers over her shoulder as she stares inside. Her view is of a resplendent dining room, not at all like the eating area of her sister's apartment. As Wyler cuts from her face in the doorway to a large buffet table full of gourmet dishes, all the emphasis is on the lure of the luxury that money can buy.

  In a deep-focus shot framed by a small dividing wall, we get our first view of Hurstwood. He seems almost incidental in a frame stuffed with well-dressed men eating and laughing. For Dreiser, life had much to do with what he called “chemisms”—invisible material forces, of which the drives for power, sex, and money are primary. This shot exposes Hurstwood's standing as nothing more than an object to be tossed around by these whirling forces and ultimately crushed by them. In this artfully structured image, Wyler captures both the essence of Dreiser's world and one of the focal points of his own.

  When Carrie joins Drouet for dinner, Wyler again visually echoes Dreiser's emphasis on money as the central value of American life. Drouet offers Carrie some money and insists that she use it to buy a coat. Ambivalent about his offer, Carrie leaves the money on her plate. Drouet then picks it up and tells her to take it before the waiter does. At that moment, a shrimp cocktail is placed on Carrie's plate, and Drouet stuffs the bills into her purse. Carrie's acceptance of the money signals her acceptance of Drouet as her lover. Wyler's images of food and the splendid décor of the restaurant thus approximate the effect of Dreiser's language, suggesting that the transfer of money and the lure of luxury are bound up with sexual excitement. Ironically, when Carrie abandons Hurstwood at the end of the film, she leaves him a purse filled with money, along with a note. Before reading the note, Hurstwood removes the money from the purse, fingers it, and stuffs it back in. Wyler is visually conveying Hurstwood's painful recognition that money does not bring happiness or excitement.

  It is at Fitzgerald's that Carrie meets Hurstwood for the first time. He helps her navigate the restaurant after she mistakenly enters the male-only bar entrance. While she explains her business there to the maitre d’, Hurstwood comes to her aid, and as they are talking, Wyler utilizes one of his rare deep-focus compositions, showing Drouet entering in the background while Carrie and Hurstwood occupy the front of the frame. This spatial separation signals Drouet's decreasing importance in Carrie's life. When Hurstwood comes calling on Carrie for the first time and invites her to the theater, Wyler captures her face in the mirror, signaling her entrapment. Within a very short time, Wyler manages to foreshadow the unhappy fates of all three characters.

  Carrie's mirrored face transitions to another scene in Fitzgerald's, where Hurstwood is picking up a bottle of champagne after escorting Carrie to a performance of Camille. He meets Fitzgerald—the Goetzes’ variation on Odets's Moy. (In the film, Dreiser's Fitzgerald and Moy's has become simply Fitzgerald's.) Less sinister but also less generous than Moy, Fitzgerald is a pious old man who suspects Hurstwood of infidelity and warns him, “Count your blessings one by one and then you'll see what the lord has done.” Hurstwood undercuts this admonition by showing him the cash box, which he refers to as his boss's real blessing. Fitzgerald, who is also a good friend of Julia Hurstwood's, informs her of her husband's affair and aligns himself with her against Hurstwood. Both Fitzgerald and Julia are examples of the pious, hypocritical morality that Dreiser condemns—people who worship money above all else.

  Hurstwood's declaration of his love for Carrie in the carriage is vintage Wyler. Its staging resembles that of the courtship scene between Morris and Catherine in The Heiress, in that Carrie is leaning away from Hurstwood as he earnestly declares his affection. Like Catherine, Carrie yields, and Wyler frames the image of their embrace by having his lovers occupy all the interior space. When Carrie exits the carriage, Hurstwood watches her walk toward the stairs of Drouet's home. The deep-focus shot emphasizes that the lovers are safe as long as they occupy a world of their own; beyond it, their passion will be destroyed when it confronts a harsh, pitiless world.

  In the following scene, in which Carrie agrees to go away with Hurstwood, Wyler stages one of his few outdoor sequences in Lincoln Park. In the light and out in public, Hurstwood cannot display his affection; he seems hesitant and tentative. Then, at Fitzgerald's, Carrie learns from Drouet that Hurstwood is married, and moments later, Julia confronts Hurstwood about his affair. Hurstwood and Carrie then quarrel over his deception; Wyler stages the scene with Carrie in a carriage while Hurstwood leans in but remains outside—their public and private worlds thus merged after Hurstwood's public image has been shattered. Hurstwood's most passionate moment, when he tells his wife he intends to grab the happiness he desires, comes as he climbs the staircase of his home and enters Julia's room. After this confrontation, he descends the stairs and exits.

  In a parallel scene, Hurstwood runs to Carrie, ascending the stairs to her apartment. Now less sure of himself and less aggressive, he lies, telling her that Drouet has been injured so that she will go with him. As she opens the door, Wyler frames Hurstwood in the doorway while, on the left, Carrie is framed in the mirror. Again, the shot reveals that their fate is sealed. Later, on the train, Hurstwood again declares his love, explaining that he is getting a divorce and will marry Carrie in New York. He then gives her the opportunity to get off the train at the next stop if she does not love him. Carrie's moment of decision is staged on the platform outside the door of the train. She is about to step off—half on, half off, like Hurstwood
in the second carriage scene—but suddenly decides to stay, and they embrace. As the train begins to move, their faces are alternately lit and then dark as the train picks up speed. Darkness and light fight for dominance as the first half of the film ends.

  The second half, which takes place in New York, deals mostly with Hurstwood's decline. Interestingly, Hurstwood becomes a man of few words at this point, speaking softly and rarely raising his voice.19 Olivier reveals the character mostly through his eyes and gestures, while Wyler utilizes light and shadow effectively here. These techniques become especially telling near the end of the film, after Carrie and Hurstwood separate. She is achieving success, while he is reduced to begging in the street. In one scene, as Hurstwood walks past the theater where Carrie's picture is displayed, Wyler has his shadow practically overwhelm her image.

  Olivier himself eventually became so upset by the gloomy, depressing nature of the film that he asked Wyler why they were making it. Wyler's description of his motivation, quoted by Archer Winston of the New York Post, perhaps best explains the film's dreary atmosphere: “The thing that intrigued me, the reason I made the picture against so much advice, was because I think a man's mistakes are more interesting than his virtues. Dreiser's people make mistakes”20