William Wyler
Page 38
With our Committee for the First Amendment, we tried to defend the principle of the secret ballot. We tried to defend not so much the Ten as a person's right to keep his political beliefs to himself, that no one would have to disclose whether he was a Communist. We tried to stand up and defend political affiliation. I remember we did try to urge some of the Ten to disclose their political beliefs to the press, but not the Un-American Activities Committee before going to jail. I knew we were on the right side of things, but we were not able to fight the whole mood of the McCarthy era.9
The CFA's attempt to confront Richard Nixon also ended in failure. Nixon had flown back to California just as the CFA delegation arrived in Washington. As Dunne recalled, “We phoned Willy Wyler…and asked him to organize a delegation and present our petition to Nixon in California. But Nixon was not to be found, either at his home or his California office, and nobody seemed to know where he was. Somehow, he had managed to disappear into thin air.”10
During the first week of the hearings, the HUAC trotted out a horde of friendly witnesses, including Adolphe Menjou, Gary Cooper, Walt Disney, Ayn Rand, and Louis B. Mayer. To counter this opening salvo, the CFA released a radio ad entitled “They Do Not Speak for Us,” which concluded, “Listen to the real Hollywood. You will find its voice is like your own. It speaks for decency, tolerance, and democracy. It defends its own point of view and defends your right to express yours.” Other radio ads followed. In one, Frank Sinatra asked, “Once they get the movies throttled, how long will it be before the Committee goes to work on freedom of the air? How long will it be before we're told what we can and cannot say into a radio microphone?”11 In another, Gene Kelly defended Wyler's film: “Did you happen to see The Best Years of Our Lives? Did you like it? Were you subverted by it? Did it make you un-American? Did you come out of the movie with a desire to overthrow your government?”12 Wyler himself took to the radio as well: “I wouldn't be allowed to make The Best Years of Our Lives today. That is directly the result of the activities of the Un-American Activities Committee. They are making decent people afraid to express their opinions…. They are creating fear in Hollywood. Fear will result in self-censorship. Self-censorship will paralyze the screen…. You will be given a diet of pictures which conform to an arbitrary diet of Americanism.”13
The references to Best Years were prompted by a statement from Dr. John R. Leehner, the new director of the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance, declaring that Wyler's film was one of roughly a dozen named in a recent HUAC report as containing communist propaganda. This report provoked a response from Samuel Goldwyn that was covered in the press. It read in part: “There cannot be the slightest excuse for having given any currency whatever to such a fantastic ill-conceived and unworthy statement…. You could not knowingly render a greater disservice to American ideals (for whose preservation you purport to stand) and to the motion picture industry than to permit such baseless irresponsibility to be uttered about a picture which has been unanimously acclaimed as exemplifying the very best of America.”14
Thomas suddenly ended the hearings on October 30, citing the Hollywood Ten for contempt; on November 24 the House of Representatives voted to uphold those contempt citations. On the same day, a group of motion picture executives gathered at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York; later, their spokesman Eric Johnston announced that they supported the HUAC's actions against the Hollywood Ten, who would be fired immediately and not rehired until they either were acquitted or swore under oath that they were not communists. The executives also declared, “We will not willingly employ a Communist,” but went on to state: “We are frank to recognize that such a policy involves dangers and risks. There is danger in hurting innocent people, there is the risk of creating an atmosphere of fear. We will guard against this danger, this risk, this fear.”15 The Hollywood blacklist was now officially in place.
Wyler played an active role in this politically charged period—a fact that would cause him considerable trouble in the mid-1950s. On May 15 he hosted a party at his home for Henry Wallace, a former vice president under FDR and the Progressive Party's current presidential candidate, who championed universal health insurance and welcomed the support of the American Communist Party. The Los Angeles Examiner headlined a story “Wallace Talks to 12,000 after Secret Fund Raising,” which breathlessly reported: “Out of the parlors of rich leftist Hollywood society after closed door excursions into fat pocket books, Henry A. Wallace stalked back to the ‘common man’ last night. Wallace was back ‘on the record’ at Gilmore Field before 12,000 cheering admirers. Ended was his sojourn into ‘top secrecy’ at the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel with 400 well-healed [sic] west-enders and later with a strictly Class A clique at the mansion of film director William Wyler.”16
In 1948 Wyler attended a benefit at the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel to raise funds for the defense of the Hollywood Ten, and he was a sponsor of the conference for world peace held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on March 30, 1949. Later that year, he signed a brief in support of two of the Hollywood Ten: John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo. In 1950 he agreed to sponsor a petition to the New York City school authorities, calling on them to lift a ban of the Nation from public school libraries. He also contributed to Helen Gahagan Douglas's campaign for the U.S. Senate and wrote letters to the Federal Parole Board, asking that body to reconsider the parole applications of Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, and Samuel Ornitz (all members of the Hollywood Ten). He also wrote a special letter on behalf of Adrian Scott, stating that he “has a young son, now aged seven, who is in school but suffers from the fear he will be abandoned, and needs a parent's love and care.”17 When Dashiell Hammett was arrested for refusing to tell a grand jury what he knew about a bail fund for four communists convicted as subversives, Wyler put up part of his bail.18
When the HUAC hearings started in 1947, Bosley Crowther, film critic for the New York Times, wrote an essay entitled “Will Film-Making Be Complicated by the ‘Un-American’ Probers?” Wyler replied to Crowther in a letter—undated, but probably written in 1947—in which he responded to that question:
I can answer unequivocally that film-making will be, and in fact already is, seriously complicated by the “Un-American” probers. I do not envy you your job of having to sit through the pictures that will be made to conform to Mr. Thomas or Mr. Hearst's standards of entertainment and Americanism. As one who has always regarded motion pictures as an important part of American cultural life, and as one who has constantly advocated and encouraged good films about contemporary life and problems, you must be as outraged as I am by these vicious attacks against the film industry.19
It was in response to this national cultural crisis that Wyler undertook the task of filming Sidney Kingsley's play Detective Story. Wyler became interested in this project as early as 1948, when Kingsley asked him to invest $1,500 in the Broadway production. Kingsley loved Wyler's film version of his play Dead End and looked forward to another successful collaboration. In May 1950, three months before he started filming Carrie, Wyler announced that Detective Story would be his next project for Paramount.
As he had done with Dead End, Wyler asked Kingsley to write the screenplay, but the playwright declined for the same reason he had cited earlier—an unwillingness to go back over the same material he had just finished writing. Wyler then offered the assignment to Dashiell Hammett, who was living in California with Lillian Hellman. Broke and in poor health, Hammett was being hounded by the HUAC, and Wyler wanted to give him a job. Hammett was unable to come up with anything, so Wyler turned the writing duties over to his brother, Robert (who also served as associate producer), and Philip Yordan (whose previous writing credits included Dillinger, Suspense, and Anna Lucasta).
Detective Story opened on Broadway on March 23, 1949, eventually becoming the second-longest-running play of Kingsley's career at 581 performances—eclipsed only by Dead End's 684 performances. The new play starred Ralph Bellamy and Me
g Mundy, and it was directed by Kingsley, who had also staged Dead End. Like his earlier successes, Detective Story offers a didactic plot, in this case centered on Jim McLeod, a fascistic, intolerant police officer whose marriage and job are both adversely affected by his callous treatment of the suspects he deals with. (Kingsley would return to the subject of fascism in his adaptation of Darkness at Noon in 1951.) But this play represents an artistic advance over Kingsley's earlier successes, in that the message does not overwhelm the story. Kingsley's command of dramatic pacing and his attention to the unities of time (the story takes place over a four-hour period), place (limited to the second floor of a police precinct), and action create a vivid portrait of a day in a New York City police station.
Thematically, the play revolves around McLeod's treatment of two criminals. Arthur Kindred, a former navy war hero, is brought in for stealing $480 from his boss. He admits to the crime, explaining that he was driven to it by his love for a woman named Joy and his desire to take her out on an expensive date and buy her things, and he is willing to pay the penalty. There are moments in the play when Arthur discusses his problems adjusting to civilian life—a theme that obviously appealed to Wyler. During his time at the police station, Arthur discovers that Joy's sister, Susan, truly loves him when she arranges to repay the money to Arthur's boss, who then agrees to drop the charges. Despite Arthur's military record and evident good character, McLeod refuses the offer, treating Arthur like any other criminal.
McLeod's second case involves an abortionist named Schneider, whose sloppy practices have killed several young women. McLeod has been after him for some time, and when he learns that his key witness against the man has died—another victim of the doctor's incompetence—he beats Schneider, sending him to the hospital. McLeod then finds out that his own wife, Mary, used Schneider's services years before she met her husband. Mary tries to explain the situation, but McLeod refuses to understand, exclaiming that her affair and subsequent abortion represent “everything I hate” and even calling her a “whore.” His unyielding attitude drives Mary away, and he ignores all advice to try to get her back. Following his final confrontation with Mary, a thief who was arrested earlier takes a gun from one of the policemen at the station, and McLeod is shot trying to retrieve it. Before he dies, however, he relents and lets Arthur go, suddenly realizing the cost of his lack of humanity.
In this play, Kingsley tries to move away from agitprop by melding social drama with tragedy. McLeod is a larger-than-life, charismatic figure who is undone by a moral flaw, and in part, the play hinges on an incident, buried in the past, that comes to light and destroys the lives of McLeod and his wife. Kingsley, however, is not a good enough playwright to bring it off. His characters remain stubbornly one-dimensional, lacking the depth and complexity necessary to lift Detective Story from the level of effective melodrama to that of compelling theater.
In a preface written for a paperback reprint of his major plays, Kingsley states that his visit to a police precinct house provided the thematic impetus for the play: “I saw that the measure of a free society can be taken right there in the police station in the relation of police activity to constitutional law.” He goes on to note, “In writing Detective Story, I was influenced by General George C. Marshall's speeches in 1947 in which he used the phrase ‘the police state.’”20 Kingsley also points out a second level to the play:
I took as my premise “Judge not, but ye be judged” from the Sermon on the Mount…. The central figure…is a moralist, wanting to bolster a collapsing civilization by turning back the clock….
…He wants to achieve efficiency by taking the law into his own hands, by making people abide by the right as he sees it, or by personally bringing them to account if they do not. Of course, the inefficiency comes from our checks and balances, so that no man can be trusted with absolute power. The answer to McLeod is that the inefficiency of humankind is really a higher efficiency, since it permits the human spirit to breathe.21
The parallels between McLeod's authoritarian approach to law enforcement and the unwillingness of the HUAC and its supporters to let America or its artists “breathe” were certainly not lost on Kingsley—and they surely account for the alacrity with which Wyler took on the project and the speed with which he finished it. Wyler completed Detective Story in only three months—a record for him.
Having encountered problems with the Breen office over Carrie, Wyler again faced difficulties with Detective Story, over the subject of abortion. In an interview with the New York Times, he lashed out against the Production Code:
Certain subjects can't even be discussed. It's as if they didn't exist. The play forcefully condemns abortion and it is proper to insist on condemnation of crime in film. But apparently we are not even permitted to condemn. This is ludicrous. The code is old-fashioned. It is fifteen years old, but the company heads won't hear of amendments. Why not discuss reality? I have two daughters who are more important to me than my pictures. There are many things I wouldn't want them to see. It is my responsibility to keep them from seeing such things. But that doesn't mean it is my responsibility to make pictures for children.22
The Breen office was unmoved by Wyler's comments, so the screenwriters were forced to come up with a new plot twist. By changing Dr. Schneider's specialty to the delivery of out-of-wedlock babies and implying that he dabbles in illegal adoptions, they managed to leave the language sufficiently vague yet allow the audience to pick up on the illicit nature of his services. In the film, McLeod learns that his wife's delivery was botched and that the baby died at birth, thus suggesting the reason for Mary's current inability to have a child.23 When he learns about her past, he calls her a “tramp”—the play's “whore” was rejected by Breen's office.
The filmmakers also simplified the role of Feinson, a newspaper reporter who hangs around the police station. In the play, he and McLeod are old friends; he calls McLeod “Seamus,” while McLeod calls him “Yussel.” Like McLeod's partner Brody, he functions as an adviser and a conscience, at one point warning, “Sometimes you've got to bend with the wind…or break! Be a little human…. Don't be such a friggin’ monument!”24 In the film, Feinson becomes a minor character, mostly a hanger-on. Otherwise, the film is faithful to the play's plot, characters, and setting.
In casting the film, Wyler retained four actors from the Broadway production: Lee Grant (the shoplifter), Horace McMahon (Lieutenant Monaghan, the precinct chief), and Joseph Wiseman and Michael Strong (a pair of burglars). For McLeod and his wife, he chose Kirk Douglas, who had starred in Champion in 1949 and would play another ruthless, destructive character in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole that same year, and Eleanor Parker, who had received a Best Actress nomination for Caged in 1950. He rounded out the cast with Cathy O'Donnell as Susan Carmichael (the woman who loves Arthur) and William Bendix as Joe Brody, McLeod's partner.
Douglas later wrote in his autobiography that he had “misgivings” about doing the film: “I had seen the play in New York with Ralph Bellamy starring. It had problems. The vignettes and characters were wonderful, but the main character had to lug the story line.” To ensure a more smoothly integrated ensemble, Douglas suggested that Wyler gather the cast and have them “do it as a play. Then you can watch the whole thing…. I put the play together at the Sombrero Playhouse in Phoenix, Arizona. Wyler came to see it several times.”25 Douglas also spent several weeks at a precinct in Midtown Manhattan, where the detectives dressed him in a uniform, had him sit in on investigations, and even let him fingerprint a burglary suspect. In his autobiography, Douglas called Wyler “a strange director: he never directed you. He'd just say, ‘Do it again,’ until he got what he wanted.”26 In an interview twelve years earlier, however, Douglas had different opinion, ranking Wyler among the five best directors he had ever worked with.27
As was his wont, Wyler shot most of the film indoors. Except for a few brief exterior shots of the street outside the station and a paddy-wagon ride with back projectio
n of city streets, the action took place on a single sound stage that housed the squad room, the lieutenant's office, an interrogation room, a file room, and the building's roof. The multilevel set was an illusion, as Wyler had all the rooms built side by side to accommodate cameraman Lee Garmes's traveling camera. Garmes recalled:
I told him to find a stage with smooth floors at Paramount; if there were any holes in them he must fill them up with putty and sandpaper them. I told him I'd use a crab dolly; he'd never used it before and he was delighted with the idea of a camera he could move wherever he wanted it…and I told him to rehearse the actors while I rehearsed the camera and lights at the same time; if I made too much noise he was to tell me. And then I suggested to him that stills be made of each final rehearsal with the dialogue attached each time, so as to speed up the actual shots. Willy had a ball with the crab dolly! We came in six days under schedule, a record for him.28