William Wyler

by Gabriel Miller

The number that pushes Fanny toward stardom, “I'd Rather Be Blue over You” (than be happy with somebody else), is also performed solo onstage, but this time, she is gliding on roller skates. The lyrics, which anticipate the substance of her marriage to Nicky, also prefigure the soaring stagecraft of the song that closes the first half of the film, “Don't Rain on My Parade”—only the second of Fanny's numbers not staged in a theater. Fanny's love for Nicky liberates her, and Wyler takes his cue from the line “Don't tell me not to fly,” showing her as she seems to fly from the train station to a train to a cab and then to a pier, where she boards a tugboat that takes her past the Statue of Liberty. Even Wyler's framing shots of Fanny in the windows of the train and the cab seem dwarfed by the momentum of the song. This moment is the emotional high point of the film for Fanny. As she concludes her song on the tugboat, she is (as in her first number) singing to no one in particular. She has, however, been liberated from the theater and thrust into the world, where the Statue of Liberty signifies that her dream of personal and professional success is finally within her grasp. The second half of the film charts her loss of the personal aspect of that success.

  Nick Arnstein's first two appearances—after Fanny's “I'd Rather Be Blue” performance and after her triumph at the Follies—are also framed within frames, both times by doorways. In Carrie, Wyler's heroine sees Hurstwood for the first time through the door of Fitzgerald's, in a deep-focus shot across the room, where he is framed by a partition. The staging of “People” occurs outside in the alleyway behind the Brice saloon. Fanny and Nick are the only two people in the scene. She sings much of the song while standing on the steps of a nearby building and staring in front of her. Nick looks at her from the far left of the frame. Not once during the song do their eyes meet, and at the end of the song, the camera moves in on Fanny's face and then, in a reverse shot, catches Nick. At the end of what is arguably the film's most romantic song, Wyler thus separates them. Nick then announces that he has to go to Kentucky, foretelling that his business ventures and his need for freedom will pull them apart. Later, in his final appearance in Fanny's dressing room, when he decides to finalize their divorce, he is first seen framed in Fanny's mirror.

  The second half of the film deals with Fanny's unraveling marriage. There is only one big production number, “The Swan,” as Wyler concentrates on narrative rather than musical theater. The first musical number in this section, “Sadie, Sadie,” is more typical of Wyler's approach to theatrical material at the start of his career. He keeps the action moving, turning “Sadie, Sadie” into a montage of time passing. The sequence begins with a close-up of Fanny's ring, moves to her first look at her new home (complete with a Wylerian multilevel winding staircase), to the decoration and refurbishment of the house, and to an outdoor champagne party, all culminating in the birth of a daughter. There is even a moment when Nick carries Fanny, in a white dress, up the staircase, reprising a similar moment from The Collector, albeit in a much different context.

  After “The Swan,” Wyler cuts to Fanny, who sits smoking as she waits for Nick to come home from the card game that caused him to miss her premiere and the party that followed. Wyler films her from behind as Nick enters their apartment, the distance between them telling. Here, he repeats the staging of a scene from The Little Foxes, when Regina enters the house after Horace has discovered the theft of his bonds: Horace, like Fanny, is seated (though he is seen in profile) as Regina comes through the front door, the stark contrasts of space and movement emphasizing the gulf between them. Wyler repeats this framing when Nick finds out that Fanny has bankrolled his share of a potential business partnership. He turns the offer down and walks the businessman to the door. Wyler then films this movement again from behind Fanny, keeping her in the foreground while the two men stand at the door. The subsequent argument between the couple takes place as they stand in the same positions, far across the large room. Later, after Fanny finds out about Nick's arrest, Wyler reverses her movement from the film's prologue. Now facing the camera, she runs through the alley toward a waiting car; Wyler then cuts to the car driving off, with the Follies marquee lit up at the right side of the screen.

  In a musical film, all the songs are usually prerecorded before the actual number is filmed, and Funny Girl was no different. Though he did not interfere with Herb Ross's handling of the big Ziegfeld production numbers, Wyler reserved the right to redo Streisand's character songs. Streisand remembers: “The last day of shooting was the song ‘My Man.’ The next day in the projection room, after watching dailies, everyone started applauding and congratulating each other. Willy turned to me and asked what I thought. I said, ‘I think I could do it better.’ The room became silent. I thought I really needed to do it live, to be in the moment. How could I feel the emotions if I was trying to lip-synch to a recording made three months before? I'm very bad at lip-synching. So I said, ‘Willy, can we do it over?’ And he did.” Robert Swink recalls that Wyler “got Omar Sharif to stand behind those black curtains—the whole scene was black—and he told him to talk to Streisand between takes. He wanted him around to help build up her sadness. They must've done at least ten takes. Willy shot the thing live and recorded it live. It was pretty emotional for her.”16 He also filmed it in one long take. Pauline Kael called it a “bravura stroke.”17

  The scene's presentation may have been dreamed up by Streisand, but the staging of the song closely resembles that of “Rose's Turn,” the finale of Gypsy, for which Jule Styne also wrote the music. Fanny's song (by Maurice Yvain) shares some superficial similarities to that musical tour de force, but it lacks the other song's power, dramatic arc, and incisive lyrics.18 “Rose's Turn” is also performed on an empty stage with the character surrounded mostly by darkness, though it is usually staged with the word ROSE in lights. Her song is a testament to her own strength as she makes it clear that she is responsible for her daughter's success. Although she realizes her daughter no longer needs her, she declares her worth, proclaiming, “Everything's coming up roses, for me.” She repeats the word me four times.

  At the end of Wyler's film, Fanny declares her love for her man with an increasing sense of desperation: “What's the difference if I say, I'll go away. When I know I'll come back on my knees some day. For whatever my man is, I am his.” Fanny refuses to admit that she cannot have the one love she always wanted. Angela Lansbury, who played Rose in an award-winning revival of Gypsy, described the show as “a tragedy of good intentions.”19 The same can be said of Funny Girl, which presents two characters who want the best for each other but let their insecurities get in the way. Wyler's ending is, appropriately, both poignant and edgy. Fanny seems strong but also desperate, clutching at the happiness she has lost. The stage version, conversely, ends on a high note, with Fanny reprising “Don't Rain on My Parade.” Her final declaration—“I simply gotta march, My heart's a drummer. Nobody, no nobody is gonna rain on my parade”—ends the play with a celebration of her strength and endurance, whereas Wyler's ending emphasizes her vulnerability and her loss.

  During filming, Streisand had several run-ins on the set with Ray Stark, but Wyler claimed he got along with his star: “What captivated me was, of course, Barbra, and my principal concern was to present her under the best possible conditions as a new star and a new personality. She was terribly eager, like Bette Davis used to be, to do different and new things. She wanted everything to be the very best. The same as I do.” He elaborated on that statement: “She fusses over things, she's terribly concerned about how she looks, with the photography, the camera, the makeup, the wardrobe, the way she moves, reads a line. She'd tell the cameraman that one of the lights was out—way up on the scaffold. If the light that was supposed to be on her was out, she saw it. She's not easy, but she's difficult in the best sense of the word—the same way I'm difficult.”20

  Wyler admitted he had trouble with Streisand at first, but he managed to establish that he was in charge: “She was a bit obstreperous in the beginning. But thing
s were ironed out when she discovered some of us knew what we were doing.”21 In fact, he exerted his control on the first day of filming, which began with location shooting in Newark, New Jersey, and New York City. (Wyler was using Newark's Penn Station as a substitute for the Baltimore train station.) Streisand recalls: “I asked him, ‘What if we do a takeoff on Garbo's entrance in Anna Karenina, where this beautiful woman appears through a cloud of smoke, except Fanny would come out coughing through the smoke?’ He didn't go for that, but he did let me do a version of my cough a bit later. He was always open to suggestions, even from me, who had never done a movie before.”22

  Funny Girl was a huge financial success. It cost about $10 million to make and grossed $66 million, remaining on the list of top moneymaking films for a long time. At the end of his career, Wyler thus showed that he could make an epic film better than DeMille and could more than hold his own with a musical. Funny Girl still ranks among the best examples of how to transfer a musical to the screen. In this musical-dramatic project, he succeeded, in part, by paring down the musical numbers and adding some period songs staged in theaters to provide the flavor and look of period pieces. Other songs, such as “People” and “My Man,” are presented simply as monologues, without any trappings; as a result, they do not seem so jarring onscreen, as many overblown numbers staged outdoors often do. Most important, Wyler gave Funny Girl what he called “the illusion of movement,” while retaining the playwright's interest in focusing dramatic scenes within a circumscribed area. Ultimately, it is his effective use of the camera as it moves through space and his characteristic lengthy takes, deep-focus photography, and long shots that make Funny Girl such an intelligent adaptation. As in his dramatic adaptations, Wyler allows the audience to observe the relationships between the characters and interpret the action.

  When Curtis Hanson interviewed Wyler in 1967 and asked if he was currently working on anything, Wyler replied, “Yes, I'm doing my first musical, Funny Girl. After that I will feel like the man who has done everything.”23 Wyler was, indeed, one of the few directors who did everything, and one of fewer still who did it all well. Funny Girl received eight Academy Award nominations, including for Best Picture—Wyler's thirteenth film nominated in that category. As the co-winner of the Best Actress Oscar— which she shared with Katharine Hepburn and, like Audrey Hepburn, received for her first starring role—Barbra Streisand became the thirteenth actor to win an Academy Award under Wyler's direction.

  While working on Funny Girl, Wyler had remained involved with Patton, particularly in reviewing the script revisions by James Webb. He was pleased with the revised script, which he considered superior to Coppola's first draft, and excited about making a war film told from the perspective of feuding generals. He expressed his enthusiasm in a telegram to Zanuck: “I still believe, as I always have, that we have the makings of a most unusual war story, different from most that have been made. It is war as fought by the commanding generals with a conflict of personalities and differing views on the conduct of war rather than battles in the field. While parts of some battles can't be avoided, I should like to see them kept to a minimum.”24

  The film was supposed to be made with Burt Lancaster as Patton, but when production was delayed a second time, he was forced to drop out. After Rod Steiger and Lee Marvin also passed on it, the role was offered to George C. Scott. Despite the fact that Wyler had fired Scott from How to Steal a Million because of his unprofessional behavior, he thought the actor would make an ideal Patton.

  However, Wyler's health was in decline—he had stomach ulcers and other problems—and his wife felt that an eight-month shoot in Spain would be too much for him, not to mention the aggravation of having to deal with Scott. Wyler reluctantly pulled out of the project. Patton, like The Sound of Music, went on to win many accolades, including the Oscar for Best Picture and another for its new director, Franklin J. Schaffner.

  Before ending his career, Wyler would make one more film. The Liberation of L. B. Jones is a harsh, uncompromising study of racism that was too far ahead of its time and failed at the box office. It was a rare financial disaster for Wyler—all the more surprising because it came after Funny Girl, which had been a box-office bonanza. Wyler, however, had long been interested in making a film on the subject of racism. Having touched on it briefly in The Little Foxes, he, along with Lillian Hellman, started working in 1942 on the documentary The Negro Soldier, which was intended to boost the morale of the troops. The film was never made, in part because Wyler feared the army would not allow him to present the material the way he wanted to.

  After the war, he wanted to make a film about a black doctor facing white hatred in the South, but Paramount would not allow it. Talking about the genesis of L. B. Jones, Wyler told Axel Madsen: “I had always wanted to do something on the racial issue…and when Ronald Lubin brought me Jesse Hill Ford's novel, it seemed a good story, very powerful, very blunt, in a way a harsh and shocking story. When the author came to us and I asked him, ‘Aren't you putting it on a little thick?’ he answered, ‘Not at all, it is all based on facts.’”25 Shortly after The Liberation of L. B. Jones was released, Wyler told Entertainment World, “I like films that contribute something to the social consciousness of the times and that is what I tried to do with this picture.”26

  The film rights to the novel had been bought by Ronald Lubin (The Outrage, Billy Budd) and screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, who won an Oscar in 1967 for his screenplay of In the Heat of the Night—a more commercial, entertaining, and compromised film than this one would be. However, the two were unable to interest a studio in the material until Wyler agreed to direct it. Released from his contract with Fox, Wyler then signed a six-picture deal with Columbia, stipulating that he would produce three films and direct three. The Liberation of L. B. Jones would be the first. The film was first titled The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones (echoing the novel), but the studio shortened it to prevent any possibility of its being confused with a costume drama about the famous poet. (There is also, perhaps, the ironic echo of LBJ.)

  Wyler cast the film primarily with unknowns. Seeking an actor who could project some sympathy into what was essentially an unsympathetic role, he wanted Henry Fonda to play lawyer Oman Hedgepath, the most powerful figure in town. Fonda was interested, but he was unable to fit it into his schedule. Wyler then cast Lee J. Cobb, who was a well-known character actor but hardly a star. The two key roles, L. B. Jones and Willie Joe Worth, went to Roscoe Lee Browne, who had just appeared in The Comedians opposite Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and Anthony Zerbe, who had recently debuted in Cool Hand Luke starring Paul Newman. Lola Falana was chosen to play Jones's adulterous wife, whose affair ignites the racial tensions in the story; it was her American screen debut, and her sexy image would be prominently displayed in the film's racy ads. Yaphet Kotto, who would later become a television star, was cast as Sonny Boy Mosby, who returns to town to kill a policeman who beat him as a child, while Lee Majors and Barbara Hershey had the nondescript roles of Hedgepath's liberal nephew and his wife.

  The film was scheduled for a ten-week shoot. Two weeks were spent on location in and around Humboldt, Tennessee—near where Jesse Hill Ford lived—and the rest of the film was shot at Columbia Studios and other locations around Hollywood. To avoid any racial confrontations while on location in the South, the crew stayed at a Holiday Inn outside of town. Black cast members stayed put at night, although, as Wyler remembered, “There was no place to go anyway.”27

  The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones, published by Atlantic–Little Brown in 1965, established Jesse Hill Ford's reputation as an important American writer. The novel was nominated for a National Book Award, chosen as a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, and regarded as an important literary property. Set in the small Tennessee town of Somerton (based on Humboldt), it explores the consequences of the decision by a prosperous black undertaker, L. B. Jones, to divorce Emma, his much younger wife, on the grounds that she is having an affair with
a white policeman. Jones wants a dignified divorce, so he asks the town's leading white lawyer, Oman Hedgepath, to represent him. Jones seriously complicates matters, however, when he insists on naming the policeman, Willie Joe Worth, as her lover. Hedgepath feels compelled to tell Worth of Jones's intentions, and Willie Joe tries to persuade Emma not to contest the divorce. When she refuses, he beats her; when she is still not persuaded, he murders Jones. The case is hushed up by Hedgepath and the mayor because they do not want to involve a police officer in a scandal and because the lawyer has implicated himself by advising Willie Joe to make sure the case never got to court.

  The Liberation of L. B. Jones is the darkest of Wyler's final films, all of which—with the exception of the trifling How to Steal a Million—deal with man's propensity for hatred and violence and the uselessness of pacifism or nonviolence as a deterrent. This film also highlights the failure of liberalism, which was Wyler's own political philosophy. Although Steve Mundine, Hedgepath's liberal nephew who comes to town with his new bride to be his uncle's law partner, is central to the thematic development of the novel, he remains a nonpresence in the film. Other than occasionally voicing understated objections to his uncle's actions and once even expressing his disappointment directly, Steve takes no action. At the end, he leaves town, disillusioned yet having accomplished nothing.

  What is most remarkable about the film is its consistent refusal to offer its audience any of the hopeful signs Ford presents to his readers. The novel takes place in 1963, against the background of the March on Washington and other civil rights protests, but none of this historical context is mentioned in the film. Also, the film's minimization of the Steve Mundine character is telling. In the novel, both Steve and his wife, Nella, take active steps to intercede in Jones's case, even visiting his home to warn him about the danger he is in. Later, Steve bails out a radical who wanders into town and ends up in jail, along with Benny, who is Jones's best friend. (Hedgepath frees him in the film.) Finally, once he quits his uncle's law practice in disgust and leaves town, Steve joins the NAACP and, at the end of the novel, proclaims, “Never again will I stand aside, defer to age and bigotry. We'll take to the streets.”28