William Wyler

by Gabriel Miller

  From that recognition scene, Wyler dissolves to Martha entering her house in the evening. She walks toward Karen, who is seated to the side and framed by a doorway, just as Mrs. Tilford was in the earlier scene. When Karen informs Martha that Joe has left, Martha stands again, and though she seems to be on a somewhat higher plane than the seated Karen, the space between them is diminished—in part because their house is so bare, dark, and lifeless. When Martha confesses that she truly loves Karen, she is seated, facing front, not looking at her friend. They are on the same physical plane, but the truth will not set anyone free.

  After the confession, Martha retires to her room. When Karen goes upstairs, Wyler places Martha in a corner, with an angled wall behind her, and Karen is framed in the doorway. The low-ceilinged room is again oppressive and shadowed. Martha tells Karen that she would prefer to talk tomorrow, and Karen leaves to take a walk. Martha's face is then framed in the window, and additionally by the curtains, as she watches Karen leave; Karen's image is also framed within the window. The framing of Martha's face here recalls a similar shot of Regina at the end of The Little Foxes. In the earlier film, Wyler traps Regina in the vortex of her greed while at the same time freeing Alexandra, who goes off with David to escape her mother and her past. Martha, in contrast, looks down on a scene of desolation.

  Inexplicably, Wyler and Hayes altered the ending of Hellman's play, wherein Mrs. Tilford goes to the school after learning the truth and offers to make restitution to Karen. This gesture of reconciliation occurs after Martha has confessed her love to Karen, and it is followed by her suicide. In the film, however, Martha is present for Mrs. Tilford's apology and offer of money, so her suicide after this revelation undercuts its dramatic impact and drains the scene of its irony. Because of this restructuring of events, the film ends not with Mrs. Tilford's visit to an unforgiving Karen but with Martha's funeral.

  The film, which opens with children at play, thus ends in a cemetery. Karen is standing at Martha's coffin, fingering a flower. Wyler opens up the scene to reveal the gravestones behind her and then cuts to Mrs. Tilford and Joe. Karen next escorts Lily Mortar to a cab and then walks the same roadway leading out of the cemetery. Wyler follows her in a deep-focus composition, foregrounding Joe and the graves while Karen seems almost lost in the distance. The central players in the drama are thus isolated amid the prevailing images of death. Karen's gait becomes bolder and changes to a stride as the camera shows her walking away. The image is ambivalent: Karen seems resolute but alone as she leaves behind Joe, the school, and her dead friend. Unlike These Three, which concludes with Karen and Joe finding each other in Vienna, the new film carries a death-inflected finality that would not have pleased Samuel Goldwyn but suited the mood of William Wyler.

  Despite the loosening of the Production Code to allow homosexuality as a subject in 1961, Wyler's film seems tentative, and it was neither a critical nor a commercial success. Two other films dealing with homosexuality and released the same year—Advise and Consent and The Best Man—fared better. Shirley MacLaine told Jan Herman that Wyler “chickened out” and “gutted scenes in the middle of the picture which showed that Martha was in love with Karen.”57 This faintheartedness seems obvious in Wyler's filming technique, which is full of melodramatic close-ups that overplay either dramatic moments or revelatory ones. Wyler, who rarely reverted to close-ups, was clearly uncomfortable with the material and unsure how to handle it. His usual control over an ensemble of actors broke down, and much of the film is poorly paced and flat. He seems more at home with the two scenes that reflect the blacklist. In the first of these, Joe is fired from his job at the hospital in what is clearly a case of “guilt by association”; in the second, Martha is shown berating her aunt Lily for not coming home sooner to testify in their defense. Lily makes it clear that she did not want to be tainted by her niece's scandal.

  Wyler made The Children's Hour after living in Italy for more than a year during the filming of Ben-Hur. As was the case when he returned from Italy after Roman Holiday, Wyler's mood had soured. There is a scene early in Ben-Hur in which Judah (Charlton Heston) is speaking to his childhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd), who has returned to Judea as commandant of the troublesome province. Messala asks Judah to help him weed out pockets of rebellion by revealing the names of rebel leaders. Asking, “Would I retain your friendship if I became an informer?” Judah refuses to help Messala maintain a “stranglehold on his people.” In a film that is partly a critique of America's ambitions of empire (recalling Rome's), Wyler effectively pits friend against friend in a political struggle that ends in Messala's death. In choosing to revisit The Children's Hour, he wanted to make a smaller, more intimate film, but one that reflected an American tragedy and spoke of his growing mistrust of the government. He stumbled, however, by overestimating the relevance and power of a play that had no tragic dimension, and by failing to confront the play's sexual issues squarely and thus turn them into a compelling symbol of America's ills.

  15

  The Pacifist Dilemma

  Friendly Persuasion (1956), The Big Country (1958), Ben-Hur (1959)

  Wyler was ready to leave Paramount after his five-picture deal ended in 1955. The studio had retained veto power over many of his decisions, and Wyler felt that he was never allowed the artistic control he had been promised. Paramount pressed to keep him, offering profit participation, but Wyler decided, while still shooting The Desperate Hours, to move to Allied Artists. He had been courted for some time by Allied's vice president Harold Mirisch, whom he had met in 1952.

  Originally part of Monogram Pictures, a B-picture unit that released Thunderbolt after the war, Allied had been restructured in 1953 and was now ready to produce high-quality films. In pursuit of that ambition, Mirisch signed not only Wyler but also Billy Wilder, who would direct Love in the Afternoon, starring Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn. Mirisch then completed his “hat trick” in early 1955, signing Wyler's close friend John Huston, who was planning to reunite with Gregory Peck and follow up their adaptation of Moby Dick with another Herman Melville project, Typee. Huston was also considering filming Stephen Crane's The Blue Hotel. (He had already filmed Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, in 1951.) in the end, however, Huston never made a film for Allied, and Wyler and Wilder completed only one film each—both starred Gary Cooper—in their short-lived association with the studio.

  Wyler decided which film he would make for Allied while still editing The Desperate Hours. Friendly Persuasion, based on Jessamyn West's series of interrelated stories about an Indiana Quaker family during and after the Civil War, had been published to some acclaim in 1945, and the screen rights were purchased by Liberty Films for Frank Capra a few months later. Capra then hired Michael Wilson, who had worked on It's a Wonderful Life, to write the screenplay as a vehicle for Bing Crosby and Jean Arthur. Wilson, having returned from World War II a pacifist, was drawn to West's portrayal of the testing of the Quaker family's nonviolence in wartime. He completed a script for Capra, but the director decided that the political climate in 1946–1947 made the story's antiwar message too dangerous, and he shelved it. When Wyler decided to do the film some ten years later, he inherited Wilson's script.

  Wyler's assistant, Stuart Millar, loved Wilson's script. He was impressed that the screenwriter had adhered closely to West's stories, and he called the script “the most incredible job of construction.”1 But Wyler had problems with it: he felt that it lacked dramatic focus and needed extensive revisions. Wilson had paid too much attention to peripheral characters, Wyler thought, and he especially disliked the treatment of the Civil War theme in the second part of the script.

  Wilson concentrated his adaptation on West's story “The Battle at Finney's Ford,” which centers on the decision of Josh Birdwell, the son of the protagonists, to join his neighbors in battle because he believes that his duty to country and home supersedes his commitment to nonviolence. After focusing on Josh's intense internal conflict as he reaches this decision, W
est's story ends with the Confederate army bypassing Finney's Ford and Josh going home without being fully tested. In Wilson's script, Josh does join the battle, but when he discovers Confederate soldiers at the river crossing near his land, he cannot fire at them and shoots into the air instead. He then gets into a fight with his brother Labe, who has followed him. (Wyler cut this character from the final script.) Gardner Overby, who is the son of a friend and engaged to the Birdwells’ daughter, breaks up the fight, and the boys go home.

  At the end of Wilson's script, Josh decides to become a stretcher-bearer—thus serving his country while maintaining his pacifist principles. Wilson, who would be blacklisted in 1951 for refusing to inform on others, wanted to emphasize that in America an individual can remain loyal to his principles. He even included a scene in which a Union major comes to the church to recruit volunteers, only to find himself ignored. The officer angrily shouts that there “appears to be an organized violation of the law.” He then backs off, stating, “I am not charging you with treason! President Lincoln himself has taken a sympathetic view of your…your pacifist convictions.”2 This episode represents a clear attack on President Truman's intolerance of dissenters.

  Wyler felt that Wilson's script, like West's story, evaded the question of what a Quaker would do when confronted with violence. He wanted his film to deal with that issue more directly, insisting that it form the dramatic crux of the story. Unable to use Wilson, who was blacklisted by this time, he asked Millar to compile a list of possible writers to rework Wilson's original script. Initially, Wyler was reluctant to consider West herself for the job because she had ducked the issue in her story, but Millar convinced him that it would be worthwhile to at least speak with the author. When Millar contacted West, however, she told him that she was working on a new novel and was not interested in any movie. She added that she had heard plenty of Hollywood stories about her book over the years, including rumors that her protagonist Jess Birdwell would be played by Bing Crosby or Spencer Tracy. When Millar pressed, telling her that he was William Wyler's assistant, West claimed she had never heard of the noted director. But after Millar reeled off a list of his boss's credits, West admitted that she had seen them all and thought “they were good pictures.”3 She then agreed to meet Wyler at his home.

  West recounted her first meeting with him in her book To See the Dream: Wyler asked her, “Who have you thought of as the central figure in these stories of yours?”

  “Jess, of course,” she said, referring to Jess Birdwell, the father of the family. “Jess is the hero from beginning to end.”

  “Stu tells me you think if a movie were made, it would have to center around the Civil War story.”

  West explained, “Everything else is either comedy, or has to do with the Birdwells when they're much older, or is very slight.”

  “Frank Capra had a script written which centers on the Civil War episode,” Wyler told her. “The last half of it has to do with the boys. Jess becomes an onlooker.”

  “In the one story, ‘Battle of Finney's Ford,’ that's true,” West replied. “But it's not true of the book as a whole.”

  “If you were to center the story on the Civil War episode, how would you get around this?” Wyler asked.

  “Invent something.”

  “What would you think of Gary Cooper as Jess?” Wyler asked.

  “Will Cooper play the part?” West countered.

  “Not in this script. Coop says if he starts a movie he likes to be in it at the finish.”4

  West and Wyler were charmed with each other, and they agreed to work together. West claimed that during the meeting she actually invented a new character for the film: a close friend of Jess's who is not a Quaker and not a pacifist, “someone as strong in his way as Jess is in his.”5 Wyler was pleased with her suggestions and asked her to write them down. He promised to forward them to Cooper and to have her over for dinner.

  Wyler also wanted to impress upon West that he was no Quaker. “He had been in the Navy [he was actually in the air force] during the war—his ear was deafened by gunfire. Evil, in his experience, had to be resisted with violence.”6 Indeed, this need to resist oppression as strongly as possible was a key issue for Wyler; in fact, it was the main reason he was drawn to the novel. He had witnessed the mayhem of the First World War from the basement window of his home and had participated in the next one. To Wyler, placing his protagonist in an extreme position that tested his faith seemed to be the crux of the story. It was also analogous to what so many in the film industry had to face in their dealings with the HUAC. Pauline Kael's observation that Wyler's Quakers are present “only to violate their convictions” was a rather flip reaction to the film's crucial issue, but it hinted at the contemporary relevance of that moral quandary.7

  When West met Cooper at Wyler's dinner party, the actor told her: “There comes a time when people who see me in a picture expect me to do something.”

  “You mean pull a trigger?” West asked.

  “Deliver a blow. Fist or bullet. Or sword. They expect it. They feel let down without it.”8

  In a subsequent meeting, when Cooper wanted to know what his character would do in the way of action, West replied: “Refrain. You will furnish your public with the refreshing picture of a strong man refraining.” But Wyler could not decide how Jess Birdwell would “refrain” until almost a year later, when the film was being edited. John Huston read the script and liked it, but when he saw that Jess was going to pick up a gun near the end of the film, “he had to stop reading,” according to Wyler. “He said it was painful for him to watch Jess, a man whose whole life had been given to nonviolence, waver.” West, however, was adamant that Jess should at least pick up the gun: “Jess is a good man, but a man with a flaw. He must be tempted to violence; and we must see him tempted. We have promised the audience that. And he must have the means of killing in his hand at the moment of his temptation.”9 In the end, Wyler decided to stretch Jess's temptation to the limit. He put aside Huston's objection and did indeed put the gun in Jess's hand, but he chooses not to pull the trigger.

  Wyler eventually offered the screenwriting job to West, whose first draft was titled “Mr. Birdwell Goes to War.” Wyler liked her work but did not consider it a shootable script. He then hired another writer, Harry Kleiner, but was so disappointed in Kleiner's script that he discarded it entirely. Wyler next teamed West with his brother Robert, who helped her with construction and dialogue; he also served as associate producer.

  Gary Cooper was signed to star in what would be his second Wyler film in the spring of 1956. For the role of Eliza, Jess's religious and opinionated wife, Wyler wanted Katharine Hepburn, but she was not available. The part was subsequently turned down by both Vivien Leigh and Ingrid Bergman. Bergman wanted to work with Wyler but was still unwelcome in Hollywood because of her affair with Roberto Rossellini. Wyler then considered multiple actresses for the role, including Jane Wyman, Teresa Wright, and Maureen O'Hara, before finally choosing Dorothy McGuire.

  For the role of Josh, the Birdwells’ elder son, Wyler wanted a fresh face, and he sent Millar to New York to find someone. Anthony Perkins was not exactly a newcomer—he was then appearing in the Broadway hit Tea and Sympathy, where he had recently replaced John Kerr. Wyler went to see the show, and Perkins sealed the deal when he did a reading for the director. Wyler next recruited two of his actors from The Desperate Hours for two other crucial roles—Richard Eyer was cast as Little Jess, and Robert Middleton was given the role of Sam Jordan, which West had created to balance Jess's Quaker beliefs. Phyllis Love played Mattie, the Birdwells’ adolescent daughter.

  West's The Friendly Persuasion consists of a series of stories, set in late-nineteenth-century Indiana, that are integrated less by plot continuity than by a pastoral mood and a cast of characters centered around the Birdwell family. Except for the Civil War story mentioned earlier, the action does not revolve around “big” events, drawing instead on the routines of family life. Th
ese everyday happenings are flavored by local color and charm, depicting a vanished bucolic world. In many respects, West's book resembles Jan Struther's Mrs. Miniver—another loosely connected series of stories about life's small routines portrayed in idyllic terms, unified by the presence of the Miniver family and the consciousness of the eponymous heroine. In both works, the approach of war threatens to unravel the central families’ unity, beliefs, and most deeply held values.

  Wyler's film begins, as does his adaptation of Henry James's Washington Square, with credits that appear to be stitched onto nineteenth-century needlepoint samplers. This homespun style, as in the earlier film, creates the feel of a vanished world, and Wyler transitions into the film's narrative by dissolving the final needlepoint into the actual setting. Unlike The Heiress, however, Friendly Persuasion is in color—it is Wyler's first color film. The look is so vibrant and the colors so intense, especially at the beginning, that the Birdwells’ farm and the surrounding countryside look like they have emerged from a storybook illustration or a painting.

  Friendly Persuasion appealed to Wyler because he saw it as opportunity to deal with the subjects of pacifism and war, which would also figure prominently in his next two films, The Big Country and Ben-Hur. He later told Axel Madsen that he would have liked to make a film about a child of war:

  Not just a child in war, that's appallingly common, but a child in a place where loyalties are divided. Because it is always the same in all countries, isn't it—patriotism and flag waving. You see them here parade with flags, hundreds of flags, and in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany all the same. Where I grew up you didn't know. You heard one thing at school and another at home. Some people were on this side and those who were on the other side were not traitors. One neighbor was on this side, one neighbor on the other. It was not simply everybody waving the same flag, right or wrong. I never found the story that would tell that. But it must have been like that in Vietnam.10