William Wyler (20 page)

Wyler's staging of these scenes is interesting as well. In Dave's meeting with Martin (which precedes the scene with Kay), Martin sits on a rail, which places him above Dave. In the next scene, Kay leans against a wall while Dave sits, placing her higher than Dave. In both cases, the higher positions connote economic advantage, but Wyler is using this spatial indicator ironically, for in both scenes, Dave occupies the moral high ground.

Dave's outdoor scenes with Kay are contrasts to a similar encounter with Drina. She is shown crocheting under a wooden structure, where it is dark and shadowed. Drina tells Dave about a rich man she met on the subway who took her out to dinner and has a house in the country; she admits that she is tempted to run away with him. (Drina, significantly, meets her dream man on the subway, an apt image of constricted city life, whereas Kay's man has a yacht.) Dave, in turn, declares that he would like to give her those things, but Drina quickly admits that it is just a fantasy—presumably, like Dave's dreams of Kay. Unlike Kay, Drina has no real chance of escaping unless, perhaps, she is rescued by Dave. Through much of this speech, Wyler films Sylvia Sidney in beautifully key-lit close-ups, emphasizing her haunted yet lovely face. Surely Dave notices what the camera sees.

One of the most skillfully realized sequences in the film is the scene in which Kay visits Dave's apartment. This episode created by Hellman (it does not appear in the play) gains power from the skillful way in which Wyler and Toland develop its implications. Hellman considered various possibilities for the sequence: in her earliest treatment (dated April 7, 1937), she invented a series of scenes in which Dave's mother plans a party for Kay, where she will use her special teacups, previously reserved only for visits by the priest. But this party sequence was discarded entirely, and Mrs. Connell appears in only one scene with Drina, early in the film. The sequence that remains is mostly silent. Informed by a neighbor that he has a visitor, Dave rushes back to his building. Wyler then cuts to Kay ascending a staircase, where she is framed by the bars of the stairs and the reflected shadows, which crisscross on the wall behind her. As she starts to climb a second staircase, she looks to her side, and in a tunneled view, the center of the frame reveals a dingy hallway with a child playing on the floor. As she makes her way upward, she stands aside for a man carrying a garbage can downstairs. She looks to her side and sees another overflowing garbage can with a cockroach crawling on top. She is horrified and turns away, rubbing her hand on a filthy part of the banister. As she backs away, looking up and debating whether to continue her ascent, there is a cut to a modified deep-focus composition: we see Kay, her back to the camera in the front of the frame, and Dave at the foot of the stairs, framed by a doorway, looking up at her. The setting and the space between them effectively communicate that this pair can never be together, even suggesting that Dave's infatuation is preventing him from realizing his true self. As Kay rushes down the stairs to escape, Dave hides in the shadows, with a hallway to his left darkly lit and at a tilted angle—an expressionist visualization of his despair. The sequence concludes with Kay running down the street and disappearing into her more comfortable and comforting world.

That decisive sequence is followed shortly by the reunion of Martin and his mother, which provides another of the film's high points. The dialogue remains essentially true to the play, but Wyler films the scene indoors rather than outside. The action begins outdoors, however, with a shot of Martin prominent in the front of the frame as he watches his mother walk toward her building in the distance. Wyler then cuts to Martin's face, which resembles that of an expectant Hollywood lover as he rushes toward her. The scene in the hallway where they meet is dark and shadowed; again, it takes place on a staircase, with the mother standing above her son. Through most of the scene, the faces of both actors are shadowed or in profile. Mrs. Martin rejects her son, slapping him and finally telling him to “die and leave us alone.” She then wearily climbs the stairs as the camera looks up at her. As is usually the case in Wyler's films, these stairs do not lead anywhere in particular; they are used to explicate moments of confrontation and recognition. Martin lingers at the foot of the stairs, staring briefly after his mother before leaving and entering Pascalgi's restaurant.

In the play, the scene concludes with Martin offering his mother money, which she rejects. Martin then asks her if she is going to call the cops. She replies, “They'll get you soon enough,” but he assures her that they won't get Baby Face Martin. The film dispenses with this entire exchange; Wyler instead follows a dejected Martin into the restaurant, where Hunk tries to cheer him up by putting on some music. Martin tells him to turn it off—he is clearly miserable, and Wyler keeps the camera on Bogart's disconsolate face. When Hunk says that Martin should have slugged his mother, Martin angrily tells him to leave. Whereas Kingsley's Martin ends the scene with an expression of hubris, flaunting his stature in front of his mother, the film's gangster is humiliated and in despair.

The parallel scene is Martin's reunion with Francey. Prior to this meeting, Martin remarks to Hunk that he wishes he had a place where he could sit in the same chair every day. His desire for a stable life is interrupted by Francey's arrival, which is depicted like Mrs. Martin's: again, we see Martin in the front of the frame, with Francey walking toward him from the rear. In this outdoor scene, the characters meet in the light, but Martin quickly moves Francey into an alley. The reunion is then shot mostly in close-up, with their faces close together and in profile, or in medium close-up with the same configuration. They recall their plan, made ten years earlier, to get married, and Martin insists that he has come back to marry her now. Francey cries that it is all a dream; she waited for him, but it has been too long. Pushing him away, she yells, “I'm sick, can't you see it!” and Wyler cuts to her face as she moves into the light, showing the ravages of her life as a prostitute.

Next there is a cut to Martin—the first Shot–reverse shot of the sequence—who is still in the dark as the camera moves closer. Wyler cuts back to Francey and then returns to Martin, who is once again disillusioned by the reception he has received. His dream of turning back time has been crushed by the reality of the world he tried to escape. He yells out, “Why couldn't you get a job?” She replies, “They don't grow on trees.” He asks, “Why didn't ya starve first?” and her retort—“Why didn't you?”—stops him cold. Her final question, “What did ya expect?” elicits only a dejected, “I don't know.” Francey accepts Martin's money, but he refuses to give her either the extra $20 she asks for or a farewell kiss. He thus ultimately rejects her, much as his mother rejected him, and this time he ascends some stone steps, repeating his mother's upward movement, as he once more escapes to Pascalgi's, his hopes shattered.

As Martin sits down in the restaurant, Wyler films him through the window, trapping him and sealing his doom. Hunk commiserates with his boss, telling him that he should never have come back and offering the old gangster's credo—“Never go back, always go forward.” (This is another addition by Hellman.) Martin has reached the end of the line. Having lost what he came for, he decides to kidnap Philip Griswold and at least get “some dough.”

Dave too is in despair; he is bothered by Tommy's use of a knife on Mr. Griswold and by Kay's reaction to the squalor of his apartment building. He runs into Drina, who is once again seen in shadow, moving under the wooden structure of the docks. She is looking for her brother, who is hiding from the police, and commiserates with Dave over Tommy's fate. Dave blames the neighborhood, saying that the kids don't have a chance growing up in such a place—it makes them fight and makes them tough. Drina argues that Dave wasn't hardened by his environment; he responds that he was a fool to believe he could do something to rebuild the neighborhood, and he shares his feelings about Kay's reaction to his building, which upsets Drina: “You always talked about that. How you were going to tear this place down and all the other places like it. You were going to build a better world where people could live decent. Now you want them down so she won't see them.” Throughout this speech, Wyler focuses on Drina's face, which is softly lit and free of shadows as she makes her impassioned plea for communal values and social action. It is another moment that is unique to the film, serving to build up Drina's character and her relationship with Dave. Although it clearly reflects Hellman's own socialist bent, this scene was probably also influenced by Robert Wyler's notes on improving the screenplay. He felt that the switching of Dave's affections to Drina at the end of the film happened too quickly: “In order to make this believable, it is essential to show that Drina is in love with Dave but that Dave has brotherly affection for her.”
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A number of scenes in the film are designed to reinforce this idea, but this confrontation is a culminating moment that makes Dave realize that Drina really loves him and that he, perhaps, has always loved her as well. It also reignites his social conscience, which has been rendered temporarily dormant by his infatuation with Kay.

Drina is then shown running up the stairs to her apartment, where she is again framed by the bars of the staircase. This final section of the film, beginning with the sequence just described, shows Wyler at his most expressionistic. Drina's despair over her brother's situation is now magnified by her sense that she has lost Dave. When Drina finally finds Tommy, she tells him that they will run away together—she has nothing to stay for. Then, when she hears Dave calling to her, Wyler cuts to Dave's face, framed by his window. Drina ignores him, pulling down her window shade, and Wyler cuts to her face, which is half in the light, half shadowed. This is one of the film's most expressive moments, suggesting that she is torn between her love for Dave and her need to protect her brother.

Wyler cuts back to Dave, who is once more double-framed by his window and by the fire escape bars. He looks down and sees, in a high-angle shot, Martin's men walking along the docks—they too are framed by bars and distinctly shadowed. In yet another sequence that is original to the film, Martin, Hunk, and a third man meet by the dock to plot the kidnapping of Philip Griswold. At one point, Wyler pushes the three to the side of the screen, where they are seemingly dwarfed by the high-rise apartment building looming over them. Dave, who knows about their plan, sneaks up on Martin and Hunk and tells them to leave, or he will call the cops. When he turns his back, Martin hurls a knife into him, and Hunk throws him off the pier and into the river.

Having survived the knifing, Dave is seen pulling himself out of the river. There is a cut to a policeman running his club along a gate—this image of approaching authority anticipates the action in
Jezebel
, when Preston runs his cane along the balustrade of Julie's staircase. In both instances, the sound is a sign of imminent catastrophe. Wyler films Martin's attempt to escape by isolating him and confining him in various spaces. Martin is first surprised by Dave, who knocks him down, but he gets away as Dave and Hunk struggle for the latter's gun. Martin then runs into an abandoned warehouse, which is completely dark except for a filter of light coming through an open door. Again, there is an ascent of a staircase, and Martin ends up on the roof of the building, with Dave in pursuit as they shoot at each other. Wyler cuts to an image of Martin from below, the frame dominated by fire escapes on the right. Like the classic gangster, Martin is now “on top” yet fatally trapped. He grabs at the bars of the fire escape but is shot by Dave; he cannot hold on and falls to the ground. Martin's death—a short, unexciting scene in the play—becomes, in Wyler's hands, a cinematic tour de force that anticipates the techniques he would use to build dramatic tension in the Olympus Ball sequence of his next film,
Jezebel
.

The film winds down quickly following this climactic showdown. Dave, after being checked by a doctor, ascends the alley and looks up at Kay's building, a grim expression on his face. Martin's diamond ring and his cash are removed by the police—a veiled comment about the futility of Dave's dream of escaping with Kay. Wyler then cuts to Tommy, whose face is barred by shadows as he learns that the police are still after him. He, too, climbs to the top of the pier and looks down on his friends, hoping to discover who “ratted him out.” When he learns that it was Spit, Tommy comes up with a plan to catch him.

This sequence is contrasted with Dave's farewell to Kay, who is presented almost literally as an emissary from another world—she is adorned in a white stole and a white floor-length gown. Wyler first films them from above, echoing the angle he used moments earlier to show Drina looking for Tommy. The repeated effect links both stories: Drina will lose Tommy, and Dave will lose Kay. In another scene by the water, Dave tells Kay that he does not belong in her world and releases her to join her wealthy lover. Tommy then gives himself up, but only after Dave has stopped him from cutting Spit's face with a knife to mark him as a squealer.

The film concludes with Tommy being taken away by the police and Dave promising Drina that he will use his reward money to hire a good lawyer for the boy. Drina retorts that he should use it to escape the slum, but Dave assures her that he now understands that escape is not what he wants. Drina looks at him lovingly and takes his hand as they walk toward Tommy. One of Hellman's drafts had the film end there, but the revised ending echoes that of the play. The street kids are roasting potatoes over a fire in a garbage can, and the police force them to put it out. As the smoke from the fire rises, Wyler follows the kids as they sing, “If I had the wings of an angel, over the prison walls I would fly—Straight to the arms of my mother.” The street gang walks together, again framed by the wooden supports of the pier, into the darkness. The visuals provide an ironic counterpoint to the hope expressed by the song and the tentative good feeling generated by Dave's reconciliation with Drina and his offer to help Tommy. Again, Wyler undercuts a potentially satisfying conclusion by underscoring it with shades of ambiguity.