Goldwyn

by A. Scott Berg

  Although he had exhibited extreme bravery over enemy skies during the war, Wyler promptly suffered a recurrence of nerves. He protested that the script was not ready, and he refused to proceed. Goldwyn explained that the entire cast had been put on salary and called to rehearse the next day. “They’ll be here every day until you show up,” Goldwyn warned him, thinking of the expense in delaying the production any further, “and you’ll pay the difference.” Before Wyler became paralyzed by his own fears, Goldwyn sent for the director’s business manager and said, “I hope Mr. Wyler’s got deep pockets.”

  Wyler showed up the next day, but the animosity between him and Goldwyn surfaced almost every morning after that in a clangorous fight, hammer and anvil pounding out some point or other—rages of the equally inarticulate that got their juices flowing. They played gin rummy together every Sunday.

  Shooting began on April 15, with the Goldwyn team of Wyler and Toland and editor Mandell at the peak of their powers. Wyler was as demanding as ever, knowing exactly what he wanted once he had seen it. Gregg Toland observed that the war had affected his director’s style in subtle ways. “Willy ... had seen a lot of candid photography and lots of scenes without a camera dolly or boom,” he noted. “He used to go overboard on movement, but he came back with, I think, a better perspective on what was and wasn’t important.” Black-and-white film enhanced the picture’s realism. Toward that end, Wyler asked the costume designer, Irene Sharaff, not to create any fashions for the actors, but to take them to department stores where the characters would have shopped and have them wear the clothes for several weeks before showing up on the set.

  Filming would continue for more than one hundred days. The first moment Wyler deviated even slightly from the Sherwood script—as he did in late May, deleting a phrase of dialogue—Goldwyn called him on it. In a letter of gentle reprimand, he reminded Wyler that he had vowed to Sherwood that the script would be filmed precisely as written, and that he wanted it “clearly understood ... that there are to be absolutely no rewrites, no changes of any nature whatever in dialogue ... without my approval in advance.” Wyler obeyed.

  He still had to suffer the usual indignities from his employer, but Wyler knew that Goldwyn had never given a director such free rein. The producer hardly even appeared on the set. The cast could remember few episodes in which the two prewar antagonists went after each other publicly. Harold Russell did recall one morning when Wyler did not arrive on the set until eleven. “That son of a bitch!” he fumed when he finally appeared. “He would like the credits to read Sam Goldwyn presents Sam Goldwyn in a picture called ‘Sam Goldwyn,’ Produced by Sam Goldwyn, Directed by Sam Goldwyn, Written by Sam Goldwyn!”

  Goldwyn maintained his distance, and the result was the most realistic-looking film he ever produced. “You know, every so often we do pictures, we don’t know our subject well enough,” Wyler explained; “in this case ... I knew my subject. I learned it the hard way and ... somehow when you get personally involved in the story something gets on the screen that makes it human and real and improves the picture somehow and you can’t put your finger on what it is, you know, but it’s the director’s personal involvement.” Wyler explained that elusive quality in one word: “Truth.”

  The Best Years of Our Lives begins at Welburn Air Terminal, where three GIs meet and board the same plane for Boone City. Homer is promptly introduced having to sign a piece of paper; his hooks prove to be no problem for him or for the soldiers around him. Within minutes, the audience witnesses Homer’s reunion with his parents, younger sister, and Wilma:

  He bends down and picks up the sea bag with his hooks. This is too much for Mrs. Parrish. She has tried to maintain her composure, but her heart is breaking, and she is forced into a great sobbing release of tears.

  MED. CLOSE—MRS. PARRISH

  She cannot control herself. Homer, greatly disturbed, comes close to her, and tries to comfort her.

  HOMER

  It’s all right, Ma—don’t cry.

  MRS. PARRISH

  It‘s—it’s nothing, Homer—

  MR. PARRISH

  (gently taking Homer’s arm)

  It’s just that your Ma is so glad to see you home.

  Harold Russell performed a number of tricky scenes, designed to show his compensating for his handicap in the most unassuming way. During one shot in which he was having a drink with Fredric March, the old pro warned him, “When I say my lines, keep those goddamned hooks down! Don’t lift that bottle of beer, because I want people listening to what I’m saying, not watching you drink beer.”

  “We got lucky with Harold Russell,” said Wyler, “because he was an absolute natural.” Goldwyn had enrolled him in acting classes, but the director insisted he ditch them. In the end, Russell compensated for lack of technique with integrity, which shone through his entire performance, even the love scenes.

  Although everybody in the film got to perform a star turn, the strength of Best Years lay in its ensemble acting. Dana Andrews, as Fred, has several tough but touching moments with his father and stepmother—actors Roman Bohnen and Gladys George—who live on the wrong side of the tracks. In his scenes with Virginia Mayo, he shows a man fighting to maintain his dignity. And he proves to be especially tender opposite Teresa Wright, who was grateful to play her first “homewrecker” instead of the simpering ingenue roles in which she was getting typecast, roles that made Wyler call her “the best cryer in the business.”

  In preparing the film, Wyler had discovered in Ontario, California, a plane “graveyard”—an endless lot of row upon row of stripped-down bombers that had been constructed too late to see action. He described it to Sherwood. The writer immediately grasped its potential, how it could become the scene of Fred Derry’s epiphany. Juxtaposed with his father’s proud reading of Fred’s citation for the Distinguished Flying Cross, Sherwood wrote of Fred’s walking among the battered veteran bombers, stopping at one, its name painted on the nose:There are also four or five Nazi flags, and several rows of bomb symbols, records of missions. The engines have been taken out. Fred stops to look at this emasculated plane with nostalgic affection.

  He looks around, then climbs up into the fuselage.

  Wyler created a scene of a bombing mission—the heavy sounds of flak and fighters and machine gun fire—entirely in Fred’s imagination. Dana Andrews’s facial expressions and the sound effects evoke the disturbing moment. It was enhanced by the music, largely an atonal representation of the sounds of the plane, starting with the revving of each engine.

  To score Best Years, Goldwyn went as he always had to Alfred Newman, even though he had headed Twentieth Century-Fox’s music department for the past five years. Newman recommended Hugo Friedhofer, a San Francisco-born musician who had gotten his first chance to score a picture when Newman suggested that Goldwyn hire him to write the music for The Adventures of Marco Polo. “I think Goldwyn still somehow thought Al was working for him,” Friedhofer said years later. “This was years after Al had been head of music at Fox. Anyway, Goldwyn took his advice without question and I got the job even though William Wyler and others didn’t want me.”

  The most conventional story in Best Years was that of Al Stephenson, the banker who comes home to find his family getting along perfectly well. Fredric March pulled out all his acting stops in quiet domestic moments with Myrna Loy and Teresa Wright as well as a few comic arias. His biggest scene is a drunken toast he makes at his bank’s salutatory dinner for him.

  March also became the focal point of one of the most ingenious shots ever printed on film. Al has met Fred at Butch’s and told him he wants this extramarital dalliance with Peggy to stop. Fred agrees to telephone her right away. As he goes to the booth to make the call, Homer enters. He and Butch, played by songwriter Hoagy Carmichael, sit at a piano and perform a duet of “Chopsticks.” Through the mastery of Gregg Toland, Wyler was able to stage both scenes in a single shot. Using deep focus, Toland enabled Wyler to situate Dana Andrews at th
e top-left-hand corner of the frame and the other three around the piano in the lower right. The camera eye was kept on Fredric March, and an audience could absorb both pieces of drama, understanding Fred’s call to Peggy without having to hear a word of it, just by seeing him in the distance as Al did.

  Even Goldwyn, who was never interested in the mechanics of filmmaking, understood that Toland’s cinematography in this picture was exceptional. He rewarded him with his own full frame in the credit titles, and he displayed Toland’s name in most of the advertising posters.

  Yet another moment in the film captured the spirit of the entire nation as it came home from the war in all its pain and glory: It practically summed up the decade. Fredric March arrives at his apartment, his children answer the door, and he shushes them, asking where their mother is.

  INT. LIVING ROOM

  It is small, but attractively, comfortably furnished.

  We are looking out through open French windows to a small terrace, where MILLY is setting the supper plates on a card table. It is just about sunset. There are three chairs. Milly looks young and alluring and very much alive.

  MILLY

  Who was that at the door?

  (she turns to look in the living room)

  Peggy! Rob! Who was ...

  Suddenly, instinctively, she knows. Throughout these years, Al has always been there, in her mind, and she has been thinking of the moment when he would walk in that door.

  She puts down a plate, hard, and goes to the French windows leading into the living room. She sees Al, as he comes through the door from the corridor on the other side of the room.

  For a while, both of them just stand there, looking at each other, appraisingly, almost suspiciously, as though they were strangers. Their silence is strained, intense....

  Wyler recalled his own reunion with his wife at the Plaza Hotel, their walking down the corridor toward each other, and he staged it exactly that way. The emotion of every wife awaiting her husband’s return could be read on Myrna Loy’s face. Teresa Wright told the actress she thought it was so effective a moment because there was “real love in that scene.” Later Miss Loy revealed the “motivation” that made it work. She said, “They just can’t wait to get into the sack.”

  Halfway through filming Best Years, Wyler panicked. His doubts this deep into the picture started to rub off on Goldwyn. They both liked everything that had been filmed so far, but they feared that the scenes were not building to a climax. They grew anxious for Sherwood to write new pages that would punch up the end of the movie. Sherwood was not concerned. He believed all the characters arrived at dramatic and logical conclusions and that the three men meeting at Homer’s wedding to Wilma, with the suggestion of Fred and Peggy pursuing their romance, was a resounding finale. For days, frantic communiques between the two coasts filled Goldwyn with qualms. Wrestling with the script one midnight, he instinctively reached for the phone and dialed Sherwood in New York, oblivious of the time differential. As soon as Sherwood picked up the receiver, Goldwyn started in with his latest thoughts—stopping only when a groggy Sherwood asked, “Sam, do you have any idea what time it is?” The next thing Sherwood heard was Goldwyn’s calling out, “Frances, Frances ... Bob wants to know what time it is!”

  Sherwood stood by his script as written, talking Goldwyn and Wyler through the remaining scenes so they might appreciate the impact of the simple ending and all its implications. What Sherwood could not convince Goldwyn of, the Breen Office could. It found the film’s ultimate message more than potent. It was poison.

  The Production Code Administration, under Joseph I. Breen’s iron hand, had many objections to the script of The Best Years of Our Lives. They suggested that the scenes having to do with the breakup of the marriage between Fred and Marie be rewritten, “in order to get away from any suggestion of a condonation of this tragedy.” A subsequent letter from Breen’s office said that Peggy’s home-wrecking intentions would have to be eliminated. The rest of the Breen Office litany cited such cinematic sins as a “passionate” kiss between Milly and Al, a “vulgar” belch after Al downed a Bromo Seltzer, and any scenes involving alcoholic beverages. Producers were “free to accept or disregard any observations or suggestions” made by the Breen Office, but the Motion Picture Association fined a producer $25,000 for releasing any picture without the seal of approval of the Production Code Administration.

  As late as sixty days into production, the Breen Office was still trying to impose its morality on the film—what Ben Hecht called “Mother Goose platitudes and primitive valentines ... {where] there are no problems of labor, politics, domestic life or sexual abnormality but can be solved happily by a simple Christian phrase or a fine American motto.” Goldwyn replied that he would make no alterations—“since we believe this ending is honest, true, and within the bounds of decency and good behavior.” When it realized Goldwyn had no intention of backing down, the Breen Office retired its objections, leaving an irreparable chink in the code.

  Best Years wrapped on August 9, 1946—with 400,000 feet of film “in the can.” While the Goldwyns vacationed at the Moana Hotel at Waikiki Beach, Danny Mandell, in concert with Wyler, assembled a rough cut of the film that was 16,000 feet, about twice the length of most movies. Goldwyn knew that two hours and forty minutes of motion picture was too long to release, but when he watched it upon his return, it never felt long. On October 17, they sneak-previewed the film in a small neighborhood house, the United Artists Theater in Long Beach, hoping the audience would indicate where they might cut an hour out of the film. Goldwyn’s staff sat in the back of the theater with stopwatches, at first timing between audience responses, then discovering long patches of rapt silence. Danny Mandell said “people stopped chewing their gum.” There was a pregnant hush after the lovers’ clinch at the finale, then a burst of applause that did not quit for several minutes. The audience’s response cards were overwhelmingly favorable, almost unanimous in unqualified praise. Out on the curb, the Goldwyn staff held its conference—Sam and Frances, Mandell, production head Leon Fromkess, and a dozen others. Wyler approached them and asked if they could release a film that long. Goldwyn said they had no choice, that there seemed to be but one hundred feet to trim at most. After each test screening that followed, someone would timidly suggest a scene that might be sacrificed. “If I’d listened to them all,” Goldwyn commented later, “the only thing left would have been the credits.”

  Goldwyn’s decision to release the film in its entirety was more than a $2.1 million gamble. Theaters would be naturally loath to exhibit the film not only because of its unusual subject matter but also because its length would dictate half the number of usual screenings. He secured a booking at the Hollywood Pantages Theater for January 1947 and looked forward to opening it in New York shortly after that. When Wyler learned of these plans, he lit a fire under his producer. He suggested that Best Years would almost certainly get nominated for some Academy Awards, and they stood a better chance if they opened in Los Angeles before the year-end deadline for qualification, rather than waiting until the following year and risking its being forgotten.

  A New York tycoon named Robert Dowling owned the Astor, which prided itself on screening prestigious films; his approval was needed before he would run a film. Goldwyn took a print to New York to show to him. In exchange for a pair of theater tickets, he rented Ben Sonnenberg’s Gramercy Park house for the night and ran the film in his private screening room. When the Sonnenbergs returned, they all drank champagne to celebrate the November 22 opening of Best Years at the Astor. While Dowling was still awestruck by the film, Goldwyn finagled one of the best rental agreements out of him he had ever gotten from any theater—40 percent of the gate. The producer used that to finesse other favorable contracts across the country.

  In his $400,000 worth of advertising, Goldwyn created an air of distinction about Best Years. Certain theaters, like the Astor, would sell tickets only on a reserved-seat basis, some for as much as $2.40. Gold
wyn arranged a screening of the film for Norman Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, and got him to promote the film in the paper’s news section if the first night’s Los Angeles proceeds were turned over to charity. The managing editor of the rival Hearst paper, the Herald-Examiner, said it would do the same if Marion Davies’s pet charity was the recipient. The Reader’s Digest announced a symposium—“Which are the Best Years of Our Lives?”—and Lynn Farnollined up a team of famous writers to contribute responses. A representative from Louisiana took the floor of the House and said The Best Years of Our Lives should be “required seeing for every American. It is a credit to the United States, and I should like this made a matter of record in Congress.” Virginia Mayo and Teresa Wright were photographed for covers of Life. Hoagy Carmichael plugged the film on his radio show; and it seemed as though all the other radio stars in America wanted Myrna Loy or Fredric March or Dana Andrews to appear on their shows.

  Bob Hope wanted Goldwyn on his show. A few days before his appearance, Goldwyn asked one of his writers, Harry Tugend, what he ought to say on the air. Tugend wrote an exchange that Hope’s writers liked. The comedian would say, “Well, Mr. Goldwyn, how have things been going since I left your studio?” Goldwyn would reply, “I’ll tell you, Bob. Since you left, we’ve had the best years of our lives.” Exactly as rehearsed, Goldwyn stood before the NBC microphone and Hope fed him his line: “Well, Mr. Goldwyn, how have things been going since I left your studio?”

  “I’ll tell you, Bob,” he said confidently. “Since you left, things are better than ever.”

  The Best Years of Our Lives opened as scheduled at the Astor in New York and Christmas week at the Beverly Theater in Los Angeles. Goldwyn was petrified after the first noon show at the Beverly, which played to an almost empty house. For reasons he never figured out, a crowd gathered three hours later, and the evening show was packed. “The public doesn’t know what they want until they see it,” Goldwyn often said; “but it’s a mystery to me [why they’re drawn in the first place]—they smell it.” In selling a picture, Goldwyn was ultimately certain of but one thing: “You can’t beat the word of mouth.”