The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (455 page)

She has not done too much lately, but she was in
Lethal Innocence
(91, Helene Whitney) and
Wonderworks: The Fig Tree
(91, Calvin Skaggs), and then a few years later she was good in a short film,
The Red Coat
(93, Robin Swicord), and a nice Miss Birdie in
The Rainmaker
(97, Francis Coppola).

William Wyler
(1902–81), b. Mulhouse, Germany
1926:
Lazy Lightning; Stolen Ranch
. 1927:
Blazing Days; Hard Fists; Straight Shootin’; The Border Cavalier; Desert Dust; Shooting Straight
. 1928:
Thunder Riders; Anybody Here Seen Kelly?
. 1929:
The Shakedown; The Love Trap
. 1930:
Hell’s Heroes; The Storm
. 1931:
A House Divided
. 1932:
Tom Brown of Culver
. 1933:
Her First Mate; Counsellor at Law
. 1934:
Glamour
. 1935:
The Good Fairy; The Gay Deception
. 1936:
Come and Get It
(codirected with Howard Hawks);
Dodsworth; These Three
. 1937:
Dead End
. 1938:
Jezebel
. 1939:
Wuthering Heights
. 1940:
The Letter; The Westerner
. 1941:
The Little Foxes
. 1942:
Mrs. Miniver
. 1944:
The Memphis Belle; The Fighting Lady; Thunderbolt
(wartime documentaries, the latter codirected with John Sturges). 1946:
The Best Years of Our Lives
. 1949:
The Heiress
. 1951:
Detective Story
. 1952:
Carrie
. 1953:
Roman Holiday
. 1955:
The Desperate Hours
. 1956:
Friendly Persuasion
. 1958:
The Big Country
. 1959:
Ben-Hur
. 1962:
The Children’s Hour/The Loudest Whisper
. 1965:
The Collector
. 1966:
How to Steal a Million
. 1968:
Funny Girl
. 1970:
The Liberation of L. B. Jones
.

In the years that followed the Second World War, Wyler was Hollywood’s idea of a great director—respectable, diligent, tasteful, a servant of stars and boxoffice potential, a reliable master of big projects. He won the best director Oscar three times—for
Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives
, and
Ben-Hur
—but he was nominated for that award a full twelve times. I would concede that
Best Years
is decent and humane, piling on Gregg Toland’s deep-focus photography for the sake of simple authenticity and extended context.
Best Years
is acutely observed, despite being so meticulous a package: it would have taken uncommon genius and daring at that time to sneak a view of an untidy or unresolved America past Goldwyn or the public. And the deep focus works like a proof, a sign of trust; whereas, for Welles, there was always a strain of madness in the deep focus. As for
Mrs. Miniver
and
Ben-Hur
, those boxoffice wonders have dated very badly: little remains but sturdy righteousness.

Wyler was educated at Lausanne and Paris (but does Europe ever show in him?), and he was twenty before he came to America to write publicity material at Universal. He went to Hollywood and got work as an assistant on such films as
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
(23, Wallace Worsley) and the original
Ben-Hur
(25, Fred Niblo).

When he began directing himself, he had several years on low-budget Westerns. He developed very slowly—caution was always Wyler’s watchword, and it schooled him in getting as much coverage as possible, sometimes beyond the patience of his actors. For two years in the mid-thirties he was married to Margaret Sullavan, whom he directed in
The Good Fairy
, a bright romantic comedy written by Preston Sturges. (Wyler later married the actress Margaret Tallichet.) By 1936, Wyler had signed on with Goldwyn: the two men fought a lot, but still it was a fruitful alliance in which Wyler surely delivered the goods the boss ordered.
Come and Get It
owes its liveliness to Hawks, and
These Three
was a censored treatment of Lillian Hellman’s play
The Children’s Hour
. But
Dodsworth
is a Wyler film: a sober, shrewd adaptation (by Sidney Howard out of Sinclair Lewis), level, fair, very well acted and grownup.

Dead End
is stagy, but it was very lofty and prestigious in its day.
Jezebel
is rather tame melodrama, though evidently Wyler understood Bette Davis’s emotional energy early on—there was a valuable romance that surely helps
The Letter. Wuthering Heights
, to these eyes, is as bad as a careful adaptation can be when no one quite gets the original material but everyone feels obliged to deliver a quality production. But
The Letter
is stirring, content to be a small melodrama, secure in its sense of the depraved Bette Davis and of the strains she puts on decent men.

Wyler did very well later on with similar projects: for instance, he understands the decay in Olivier’s character in
Carrie
and quietly produces a social realist tragedy worthy of Dreiser. But
Carrie
was one of the later Wyler’s few failures. Instead, people congratulated themselves on the charm of
Roman Holiday
or
Friendly Persuasion
, as well as the spuriously “intelligent epic” of
Ben-Hur
or
The Big Country
. Steadily in the fifties, America rejoiced in the anodyne accomplishment of Wyler, Stevens, and Zinnemann, while rejecting or ignoring the real beauty in Nick Ray, Fuller, Anthony Mann, and Minnelli.

Whenever he could, Wyler did adaptations, from sensible scripts. But the results were mixed: nearly thirty years later, he fumbled again with
The Children’s Hour
. But
The Little Foxes
is played for all its worth, and
The Heiress
is truly frightening because of Ralph Richardson’s hushed, condescending tyrant. There are fine performances in Wyler films, not least Kirk Douglas in the grim and remorseless
Detective Story
(from the Sidney Kingsley play), Bette Davis always, and just about everyone in
Dodsworth, Carrie
, and
Best Years
.

In recent years, Wyler has become more problematic (or interesting) for me. The duds stay duds, but
Dodsworth, Little Foxes, Best Years, Carrie, The Letter
, and
The Heiress
build. But let’s face it: the “realism” in Wyler is a trick—his real forte is melodrama done in a hushed, shocked tone. It’s a cautious man’s observation of shocking events. He’s like David Lean afraid of becoming Douglas Sirk.

Jane Wyman
(Sarah Jane Fulks) (1917–2007), b. St. Joseph, Missouri
Plucky girls with baby faces can take heart: Jane Wyman was in movies more than ten years before people began to cry over her. But she clutched on to ingenuous sincerity and the world came round, forgiving all the parts she had had in tame musicals and Westerns.
Johnny Belinda
(48, Jean Negulesco), the film for which she won an Oscar, is an evasive, slick sob story. The way in which, at age thirty-four, she played a girl supposedly half her age, ostensibly deaf-mute but looking as neat and wholesome as a Mabel Lucy Attwell cherub, is evidence of make-believe becoming more artificial as it lumbers toward a subject that is “authentic” and “daring.”
Johnny Belinda
is uncut corn, but Wyman had a soulful, wide-eyed face (such as made handicap acceptable) and, under Negulesco’s gloating direction, it was no surprise that she won an Oscar. That film also established her as a stimulant to tears for another eight years.

She had begun in small parts in musicals at Warners:
The King of Burlesque
(35, Sidney Lanfield); a bit part at Universal in
My Man Godfrey
(36, Gregory La Cava);
Cain and Mabel
(36, Lloyd Bacon);
Gold Diggers of 1937
(36, Bacon);
Stage Struck
(36, Busby Berkeley);
The King and the Chorus Girl
(37, Mervyn Le Roy);
Ready, Willing and Able
(37, Ray Enright);
Slim
(37, Enright); and
The Singing Marine
(37, Enright). In 1938, she made
Brother Rat
(38, William Keighley), with Ronald Reagan, whom she married in 1940 (divorced in 1948). By then, Warners were loaning her out or putting her in minor Westerns:
The Spy Ring
(38, Joseph H. Lewis);
The Crowd Roars
(38, Richard Thorpe);
Fools for Scandal
(38, Le Roy);
Tail Spin
(39, Roy del Ruth);
An Angel from Texas
(40, Enright);
Brother Rat and a Baby
(40, Enright);
My Love Came Back
(40, Curtis Bernhardt);
Bad Men of Missouri
(41, Enright); and
Larceny Inc
. (42, Bacon). She made
My Favorite Spy
(42, Tay Garnett) at RKO and
Footlight Serenade
(42, Gregory Ratoff) at Fox. Back at Warners, she was in
Princess O’Rourke
(43, Norman Krasna), and then Billy Wilder gave her a thankless, suffering role of the girlfriend in
The Lost Weekend
(45).

Things looked up a little after that:
Night and Day
(46, Michael Curtiz);
The Yearling
(46, Clarence Brown);
Magic Town
(47, William Wellman);
Cheyenne
(47, Raoul Walsh); and
A Kiss in the Dark
(48, Delmer Daves). But it was
Johnny Belinda
that defined her place in women’s pictures:
The Lady Takes a Sailor
(49, Curtiz); a cloying performance in one of Hitchcock’s worst films,
Stage Fright
(50); bewildered in
The Glass Menagerie
(50, Irving Rapper);
Here Comes the Groom
(51, Frank Capra);
Three Guys Named Mike
(51, Charles Walters);
The Blue Veil
(51, Bernhardt);
Just For You
(52, Elliott Nugent); as the matriarch in Edna Ferber’s
So Big
(53, Robert Wise); and then in two outstanding Douglas Sirk women’s pix, her swan song: as the blind woman in
Magnificent Obsession
(54), which she persuaded Universal to make, and the sequel to success,
All That Heaven Allows
(55). That she is innocuous and the films so impressive speaks for Sirk’s orchestration of players within his graceful images. After
Lucy Gallant
(55, Robert Parrish) and
Miracle in the Rain
(56, Rudolph Maté), she went into semiretirement, interrupted by
Pollyanna
(60, David Swift);
Bon Voyage!
(62, James Neilson);
How to Commit Marriage
(69, Norman Panama);
The Incredible Journey of Doctor Meg Laurel
(79, Guy Green); and the TV series
Falcon Crest
for most of the eighties.

Y

Isuzu Yamada
b. Osaka, Japan, 1917
Unlike Japan’s other most famous women stars, Isuzu Yamada has been as important a stage actress as a screen presence—partly from preference, partly because she had serious battles with the studios over political and labor issues, and was sporadically blacklisted. Even so, she was a central figure for over four decades—beginning at the age of fourteen, and in her twenties starring in Mizoguchi’s two most important films of the 1930s,
Osaka Elegy
(36) and
Sisters of the Gion
(36). In the West, her best-known roles were for Kurosawa: the Lady Macbeth of
Throne of Blood
(57); the shrewish landlady of
The Lower Depths
(57); and the vicious brothel keeper of
Yojimbo
(61)—all highly theatrical performances. She was superb in Ozu’s
Tokyo Twilight
(57), as a mother who abandoned her children; in Naruse’s
Flowing
(56), as the madame of a seedy geisha house; and as the older woman in Shiro Toyoda’s comedy
A Man, a Cat and Two Women
(56). She has also worked for Gosho, for Ichikawa, and for Teinosuke Kinugasa (one of her six husbands) in
Actress
(47), a film based on the life of Japan’s first female stage star, whose rebellious story mirrors Yamada’s own.

Peter Yates
, b. Ewshotts, England, 1929
1962:
Summer Holiday
. 1964:
One Way Pendulum
. 1967:
Robbery
. 1968:
Bullitt
. 1969:
John and Mary
. 1971:
Murphy’s War
. 1972:
The Hot Rock
. 1973:
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
. 1974:
For Pete’s Sake
. 1976:
Mother, Jugs & Speed
. 1977:
The Deep
. 1979:
Breaking Away
. 1981:
Eyewitness
. 1983:
Krull; The Dresser
. 1985:
Eleni
. 1987:
Suspect; The House on Carroll Street
. 1989:
An Innocent Man
. 1992:
Year of the Comet
. 1995:
Roommates; The Run of the Country
. 1999:
Curtain Call
. 2000:
Don Quixote
(TV). 2003:
A Separate Peace
(TV).

Bullitt
is an odd coincidence of interests: of Steve McQueen’s identification with automobiles and Peter Yates’s earlier experience in motor racing. Yates was also a product of Charterhouse and the Royal Court Theatre but, apart from
One Way Pendulum
, these roots have still to show themselves in his work. There is a dependence on novelty that reveals Yates’s lack of character.
Summer Holiday
was a “breakthrough” English musical, with Cliff Richard, suddenly upstaged by the arrival of the Beatles.
Robbery
was a version of the Great Train Robbery, too close to reality to feel free, too coy about that proximity to be penetrating. In America, Yates has done nothing more profound than send hubcaps careering round corners.
John and Mary
is as wet and still as a puddle.
Murphy’s War
is about another machine, a wrecked airplane rebuilt for war by Peter O’Toole. Just as the vehicles are better tended than the actors in
Bullitt
, so
Murphy’s War
fails even to give a routine service to O’Toole.
The Hot Rock
is a watchable film with a welcome hint of comedy, and
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
contains the first impressive performance in Yates’s work—from Robert Mitchum. Another gift to us all has been the startling prospect of Jacqueline Bisset’s nipples in
The Deep
, a film of such silliness and massive boxoffice returns that even a conscientious critic is driven to consider the merits of soaked shirts.