William Wyler (18 page)

Wyler's final scene in
Come and Get It
is markedly different from Hawks's conclusion to
Red River
. Hawks's scene, for one thing, is much more violent: when Tom confronts Matt, he shoots at him five times, trying to force his son to draw his gun, and when this fails, he starts punching Matt until the younger man finally fights back. The struggle is eventually broken up by Tess (Joanne Dru), who reminds them that they really love each other. Father and son acknowledge their love, and the film ends with Tom making Matt his partner at the ranch and changing the brand to signify a union that, until that moment, had been unspoken. Hawks was criticized for substituting a more conventional happy ending for the traditional one originally planned for his film, which would have had Tom, the flawed tragic figure, dying at the end but recognizing his failings before he dies and leaving Matt free to live his life.

Wyler's vision is more unsparing, but after all the script modifications and then the change in directors,
Come and Get It
is neither well developed nor focused enough to qualify as tragedy. Unlike Tom Dunson, Barney Glasgow is left at the end without his son or Lotta. He still has the wife he never loved and a business empire that no longer fulfills his needs. The differences in temperament between the two directors are as marked as their styles, but in
Come and Get It
, Wyler has the last word.

When filming was finally finished, Wyler and Goldwyn had another fight. Goldwyn wanted to drop Hawks's name altogether and give Wyler sole credit as director. Wyler adamantly refused, insisting not only that Hawks's name be retained in the film's credits but that his own be omitted. Goldwyn finally compromised, and both names appear in the credits. Wyler won a victory of sorts, however, in that Hawks's name appears first. Wyler never considered
Come and Get It
one of his films and rarely discussed it.

Despite its considerable problems,
Come and Get It
fared just as well with the critics as
Dodsworth
had. The
New York Times
opened its review by praising Goldwyn and pronouncing the film “as fine in its way as those earlier Goldwyn successes of this year, ‘These Three' and ‘Dodsworth.' It has the same richness of production, the same excellence of performance, the same shrewdness of direction.”
²⁸
In a letter to Wyler, Jimmy Townsend of Myron Selznick's office wrote that William Wellman, who had attended the premiere, said “he would be proud to have his name on the picture” and went on to call it “the current rave in Hollywood.”
²⁹
This assessment turned out to be accurate: despite its escalated costs,
Come and Get It
outperformed
Dodsworth
at the box office.

Dead End
(1937)

After
Come and Get It
, Goldwyn decided to assign his star director to another prestige property,
Dead End
. Wyler and Goldwyn had seen the play together in March 1936 (it had opened in October of the previous year), when Wyler was working with Sidney Howard on the
Dodsworth
script. Once Goldwyn had purchased the rights, Wyler would see it for a second time in September with noted playwright Clifford Odets, who was apparently being considered to write the screenplay. After the show, Wyler sent his boss a telegram: “Odets and I saw Dead End for second time tonight both feel we could make outstanding picture.”
¹

Dead End
was the second hit for playwright Sidney Kingsley, whose first play,
Men in White
(1933), had won the Pulitzer Prize. It then became the Group Theatre's first commercial success, running for 357 performances on Broadway; it had a substantial run in London as well.
Dead End
would prove to be an even bigger success, with 684 performances—an extraordinary run for a serious play.

Kingsley's early success as a playwright was due in part to some fortunate production choices. Much of the success of
Men in White
was due to Lee Strasberg's brilliant direction. Intuiting that the central strength of Kingsley's play was its detailed portrait of hospital life, Strasberg centered on the pictorial qualities of the work, culminating in a breathtaking scene of an operation: Bright white lights focused on the operating table, flooding the area and causing the doctors' gowns and the sheet over the patient to stand out against the blue walls. When the doctor said “Scalpel,” another light made the blade glint as it was lowered toward the body. Producer Cheryl Crawford recalled that this effect was “as painful as the scalpel making the incision.”
²

The staging and the spectacular effects distracted audiences—but not critics—from Kingsley's shortcomings as a playwright, which included a tendency to create one-dimensional, representative characters and cumbersome dialogue that drained those characters of any capacity for self-reflection or genuine emotion. Kingsley's plays, however, remain notable for their sense of optimism and their faith in progress, the future, and the human spirit.
Men in White
is a tribute to the medical profession and to the doctors who sacrifice their personal happiness for the improvement of medical care. Kingsley dedicated the play to “the men in medicine who dedicate themselves, with quiet heroism, to man,” thus aligning it with the optimism of New Deal America and assuring the play's popularity.
³

Dead End
would also be distinguished by a spectacular set, designed by Norman Bel Geddes, that stunned audiences with its depiction of an entire neighborhood. A narrow tenement street ran down one side of the stage, while the other featured a new apartment building for the wealthy. Another street dead-ended at New York's East River; the pier's pylons and rotting timbers were extended over the edge of the stage and into the orchestra pit, which doubled as the river. Bel Geddes even recorded the sounds of the streets, the river beating against the pier, the foghorns in the harbor, and the splash of water when the tenement kids jumped into the river to swim—the actors actually jumped into a net in the orchestra pit below, while a stagehand threw some water up onto the stage to make it appear that the pit was filled with water.
⁴

Like much of his work, Kingsley's second play is a didactic piece that remains firmly rooted in the social activism that was prominent in much of the literature and theater of the 1930s. This work, too, revolves around social issues, presenting characters who typify either a condition or a social position.
Dead End
is a naturalist drama, focusing on the environment's role in shaping character and on the tendency, in a society that allows wealth and poverty to exist side by side, to foster and encourage crime. The play's epigraph is from Thomas Paine: “The contrast of affluence and wretchedness is like dead and living bodies chained together.” Despite its shortcomings, Kingsley's presentation of a reality so stark and so uncompromising ultimately forced his society to confront those problems. Eleanor Roosevelt came to see the play three times and arranged its command performance at the White House. President Franklin Roosevelt subsequently appointed a slum study commission.
Dead End
was also the inspiration for Congress's passage of the Wagner housing bill, providing financial assistance to the states to eliminate unsafe and unsanitary housing conditions.

At the center of the play is a gang of teenagers who congregate on the streets and swim in the filthy East River. (The neighborhood is the East Fifties, near what is now Sutton Place.) They play cards, fight with other gangs, and roast potatoes in garbage cans. But the coarse vitality of this street culture is being impinged on by the presence of new high-rise luxury apartments, whose residents view these kids as hoodlums. The lives of the teenagers are interlaced with several other story lines. One involves a young, idealistic, but out-of-work architect named Gimpty, who grew up in the neighborhood and sympathizes with the boys' plight. He loves a young woman named Kay, who lives in the new luxury apartment building, and he idealizes her, in part because she seems unreachable. He is also friendly with Drina, the older sister of a gang member who is raising her brother and is active with her union.

One day, Baby Face Martin—a childhood friend of Gimpty, but now a notorious killer wanted by the FBI—returns to the neighborhood. In Kingsley's didactic scheme, Martin represents the worst-case scenario of what the slums can produce, and he functions as an obvious contrast to Gimpty's humanistic social ideals. The play's two emotional high points are Martin's reunions—first with his mother, and then with his former sweetheart, Francey. His mother spurns him, recoiling from his presence. When he offers her money, she slaps and curses him. The scene with Francey offers another of the play's stark contrasts. Here, Martin recoils when he discovers that she has become a prostitute and is suffering from a venereal disease. Francey not only accepts his money but asks for more.

The final plot strand involves the neighborhood gang, focusing particularly on Tommy, Drina's brother. In another of the play's contrasts, the gang members' lives are paralleled with that of Philip Griswold, a pampered child who lives in the high-rise apartment with his well-connected parents and a nanny. In one scene, some of the boys beat up Philip and steal his watch. When Philip's father catches Tommy, he locks him in a stranglehold, retrieves the watch, and calls the police. While struggling to free himself, Tommy manages to cut Mr. Griswold with a knife and escapes. Griswold is not seriously hurt but insists that the police catch Tommy and arrest him.

These two plots converge as Gimpty informs the FBI of Martin's whereabouts; a gunfight ensues, and Martin is killed. Likewise, another gang member, Spit, informs on Tommy, who eventually gives himself up. Griswold insists on pressing charges, but Gimpty pleads for Tommy, claiming that reform school will only make him a hardened criminal like Martin. Griswold refuses to relent, and Tommy is taken away by the police. The play ends with Gimpty's promise to Drina that he will use the reward money for informing on Martin to hire the best lawyer possible for Tommy. Gimpty and Drina leave together as the curtain falls.

Goldwyn was interested in the rights to the play from the very beginning. Merritt Hulburd wrote to Goldwyn on November 8, 1935, a little more than a week after
Dead End
opened, and informed him that a common stock company called Dead End Inc. owned 50 percent of the film rights. Hulburd advised, “While there is [a] definite element of risk from a business standpoint in this deal, we feel that since we are solely interested in acquiring rights to this play, it is a worthwhile undertaking.”
⁵
Two weeks later, Hulburd notified Goldwyn that someone had offered “substantially in excess of $100,000” for the rights to
Dead End
. He believed David Selznick had bid $150,000 for the play and warned that Goldwyn would have to top that offer.
⁶
The next day, Goldwyn closed the deal for $165,000. “That was the great thing about Goldwyn,” Wyler said. “if there was some great material and he wanted it, he would just buy it, just like that.”
⁷
Wyler had reason to be excited. On the night Wyler saw the play with Goldwyn, the producer hired him to direct the film—it would be Wyler's third assignment directing a prestige property. After they reached an agreement, Goldwyn put down a $25,000 good-faith deposit and left for Europe.

Goldwyn wanted Sidney Howard, who had just scripted
Dodsworth
, to adapt
Dead End
as well. Hulburd wrote to Howard in September 1936, saying that he needed him to start at once. Howard, however, was busy working on
Gone with the Wind
, so Goldwyn turned to Lillian Hellman, whom he cajoled by writing, “Believe me, I do not think there is anyone who can write ‘Dead End' as well as you can.”
⁸
At the time Hellman, was busy completing a social play of her own called
Days to Come
; in adapting Kingsley's play, she would manage to insert some of her ideas about labor and unions.

For the role of Drina, which was made more prominent in the film, Goldwyn insisted on Sylvia Sidney, who was under contract to Walter Wanger. Sidney had already starred as an oppressed working girl in Josef Von Sternberg's
An American Tragedy
and in King Vidor's film of Elmer Rice's
Street Scene
, which
Dead End
resembled in some details. (Wyler telegrammed Goldwyn that Margaret Sullavan, whom he would soon divorce, would be a good choice for the role if Sidney was unavailable; as it turned out, Sidney got the role.) Joel McCrea was once again chosen to costar as Dave Connell—Gimpty's new name for the film. This revised character would lose his limp and, instead of informing on Baby Face Martin, would hunt him down and shoot him himself.

For the role of Baby Face, Goldwyn wanted James Cagney, who had just won a case against Warner Brothers breaking his long-term contract. Reeves Espy, a Goldwyn executive, advised his boss that even though Warner Brothers was appealing the decision, there was no reason that Cagney could not be approached. He warned Goldwyn, however, that becoming embroiled in a Warner-Cagney fight was not advisable. The part was next offered to George Raft, who turned it down because he thought the character too vicious. Finally, the role went to Humphrey Bogart, who had recently won acclaim on Broadway as the gangster Duke Mantee in Robert Sherwood's
The Petrified Forest
, a role he reprised in the film version. Marjorie Main reprised her stage role as Martin's mother, and Claire Trevor was cast as Francey.

Goldwyn wanted to cast the street kids from among the usual group of Hollywood child actors, but Kingsley, with Wyler's help, convinced him that this would be a mistake, and the actors from the original stage production were hired. Kingsley explained, “I had spent many months working with these kids, and they were as close to the real thing as he could find; and although they had individual problems, they were gifted and precisely the characters—nobody could play them as well.”
⁹
Indeed, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Gabriel Dell, Bernard Punsley, Bobby Jordan, and Billy Halop did so well that they were dubbed “The Dead End Kids” and went on to sign contracts with Warner Brothers, which made a series of films about their exploits.

Wyler wanted to shoot the film in New York to capture the authenticity that Kingsley had tried to achieve in the play. Goldwyn, however, disliked location shooting because it meant he had less control over his directors. So he hired Richard Day, who had just won an Oscar for the set design on
Dodsworth
, to build an elaborate set duplicating a ghetto street with shops and seedy apartments and even the balcony of a luxury apartment; one end of the sound stage was excavated and filled with water to stand in for the East River. The result was much like the stage set, only on a grander scale—it cost Goldwyn around $100,000. It was the talk of Hollywood, although Wyler hated it and found it “phony”: “It was very fashionable in those days to build in the studio even when the real thing was standing somewhere. That was one battle I lost.”
¹⁰

Despite all the effort and expense he had put into duplicating a slum, Goldwyn wanted it to be clean. Wyler would litter the set each morning to make it look authentic, but Goldwyn was horrified and insisted that Wyler clean up the street. When Wyler refused, the producer picked up the debris himself and threw it away. “Goldwyn didn't like dirt,” Wyler recalled. “Everything in his movies had to be clean.”
¹¹
Even the soundtrack was free of city noises. As Scott Berg notes, Goldwyn's “pictures had a distinctive look about them—a feel that was always tasteful, even in an East Side slum.”
¹²
Goldwyn's desire for fastidiousness was reinforced by Joseph Breen, who wrote, “We would like to recommend in passing, that you be less emphatic, throughout in the photographing of this script in showing the contrast between conditions of the poor in tenements and those of the rich in apartment houses.”
¹³
The filmmakers should refrain from showing “the presence of filth or smelling garbage cans, or garbage floating in the river, into which the boys jump or swim.” Breen felt that such details would “give offense.”
¹⁴

Wyler compensates by creating his most expressionistic film. Although much of
Dead End
takes place outdoors, the film has an interior feel. It is composed of numerous vertical shots, diagonal angles, and frames within frames, thus embracing within its mise-en-scène Kingsley's notion that environment can trap individuals and crush them. On the stage, Bel Geddes's set made the audience feel as if they were watching the activity of a real New York street. Wyler, in turn, emphasizes the artificiality of his film set, taking Kingsley's stark patterning of character and situation for his stylistic blueprint. He imprisons his characters in space and relentlessly manipulates them there. The film is intricately structured, featuring shaded close-ups, elaborate setups, and quick vignettes.