William Wyler (26 page)

Lake's revised treatment makes some important changes. Steve is still forced to leave New York because of a trumped-up murder charge, but not before expressing an interest in going out west, where his father owns a ranch. He tells his father that he is sick of New York and wants to “help make a new country, rather than try to make over an old one.”
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Bart McClosky is still the villain, but in this second version, he sells Steve a stolen horse, hoping that Bean will hang him. One of McClosky's hired guns, whom Steve eventually kills, is named Cole Hardin—which would become the name of the hero in the finished film. Here, it is Hardin's shooting that gets Steve arrested in neighboring Jacktown, where McClosky runs things, and with the help of some deputies, he escapes a plot to kill him. In this version, Bean is the protector of Blanche and her mother, whose ranch was destroyed when rustlers killed Blanche's father. At the end of this treatment, Bean makes Steve his successor. Texas Rangers, who have been sent to make Bean a real judge, appoint Steve instead, who stipulates that he wants McClosky and his associates sent back to New York. The treatment concludes with Steve proposing to Blanche.

In August, Dudley Nichols and Jo Swerling were brought in to reshape the story. By this time, their script was titled “Cooper Story.” Their revisions bring the story closer to that of the finished film. It opens in Bean's court, where a horse thief is being sentenced to hang. He turns out be Gary Cooper, whose character's name is not mentioned until the end of the script. Cooper hands Bean his watch, which contains a picture of Lillie Langtry (formerly Lydia Lyndow), and this stops Bean in his tracks. Cole Hardin then enters the bar. He works for McClosky—the rivalry between McClosky and Bean is still retained at this point but would eventually be dropped. According to Swerling and Nichols, McClosky represents “legal law,” which he has corrupted, while Bean represents “gun law,” devised out of necessity. The Cooper character recognizes Hardin as the man who sold him the stolen horse and demands his $100 back, but Hardin answers with an insult, whereupon Cooper punches him in the jaw, knocks him out, and takes back his money. When Hardin recovers, he pulls his gun on the unarmed Cooper, but Ella (who will become Jane-Ellen) shoots it away. Cooper tells Ella that he wants to go farther west, where there are no women, and buy a ranch there. Bean suggests that he go with Ella instead; she has a ranch but no stock since her father was killed by rustlers, most likely headed by McClosky. There follows a series of exciting cinematic action scenes, including one in which Cooper happens on Hardin and others herding stolen cattle. Flicking away a match, Cooper starts a fire that causes a stampede. Cooper then rounds up the cattle and drives them to Vinegarroon. After McClosky arrests Cooper in Jacktown, Bean organizes a posse to rescue him; a battle ensues, and Bean is wounded and captured. Meanwhile, Cooper has captured McClosky, and a prisoner exchange is arranged, over Bean's objections.

Lillie Langtry gives a performance in Vinegarroon. She meets Cooper backstage, and we learn that they knew each other in the East—Lake's backstory, however, has been eliminated. Lillie asks Cooper to join her for the rest of her tour and then return east with her. During the concert, McClosky's men attack, and Bean is wounded again. Belatedly learning that he has been appointed a district judge, he makes it his first and last order of business to reverse his ruling on Bingham Smith (Cooper's name); then he dies, surrounded by Cooper, Lillie, and Ella. Lillie, who has intuited that “Bingo” is in love with Ella, leaves to resume her tour.

Niven Busch replaced Dudley Nichols and, in a revision titled “Saddle Tramp,” produced a story that most closely resembles the finished film. Cooper's character is now named Cole Hardin, and the entire eastern backstory, along with his relationship with Lillie Langtry, has been dropped. Bean's relationship with Cole is brought to the fore, leaving the evolving love story between Cole and Jane-Ellen in the background. The writers included a humorous note in this script: as Bean is presiding over a greased pig contest (cut from the film), the directions read, “It is obviously impossible to describe in detail the progress of the contest, since not even Mr. Wyler can tell a greased pig what to do.”
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Busch also adds the final shoot-out at the Davis Opera House, where Bean buys all the tickets to Lillie's show and must confront Cole, who has been deputized to arrest him.

The changes in the final script were no doubt motivated by a memo from Edwin Knopf, a story editor for Goldwyn. He criticized Swerling, who, he advised, should be taken off the project for splitting the action between Jacktown and Vinegarroon. Knopf thought the film should take place entirely in Vinegarroon and its environs, stating, “It would tighten up the arena in which the play is performed and give you a concentration of action…[but] most importantly, it would emphasize the battle of Cooper versus Bean which to me is the essence of the drama.”
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Knopf's suggestions were echoed by Jock Lawrence, Goldwyn's head of publicity, who emphasized that the second most important element was the love story involving Cole Hardin and the girl; the major story line, however, was the relationship between Cole and Roy Bean.
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Realizing that the starring role belonged to Bean (Walter Brennan), Cooper wired Goldwyn that he did not approve of the material. “It looked like his [Brennan's] picture,” Cooper wrote. “A cowboy ultimately rode in and exchanged a few shots to the detriment of the judge, but that struck me as being incidental. I couldn't see that it needed Gary Cooper in the part.”
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Goldwyn, complaining that that “Goddamned Cooper is trying to kill me,” fired back a telegram: “While I appreciate the sincerity of your solicitude about the story I am sure that you must realize that the responsibility for the selection of stories is always mine and I have never had any desire to shift this responsibility to you or anyone else.”
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Over the next couple of weeks, Goldwyn assured Cooper that his part was being revised and expanded and that if he did not report to work, he would be sued for all expenses incurred on the film to date, amounting to $400,000. Cooper reported for work, but not before sending Goldwyn a strongly worded letter: “After careful and reasonable consideration I regret to advise you that the character Cole Hardin is still inadequate and unsatisfactory for me, in my opinion as is the story.” He went on to say that the script's weaknesses violated the spirit of their working agreement: “Like you, I have a position to uphold. My professional standing has been jeopardized from the beginning.” He concluded by writing, “The force and your strategy in throwing the blame on me is unprecedented…. I bow to your threats since normal reasoning and friendly relations mean little, if anything to you.”
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Goldwyn tried to placate his star, writing that he did not think “there is any justification for such feelings on your part.” He insisted that he had done everything he could to make Cooper happy and assured him that they could work together again, even mentioning three projects he was developing for Cooper: “Seventh Cavalry,” “Hans Christian Andersen,” and “Arrowsmith.”
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The film was budgeted for $1 million and filmed on location outside Tucson, where Goldwyn got the governor of Arizona to proclaim the location site Goldwyn City, Arizona—a publicity stunt that made headlines in the
Hollywood Reporter
.
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Goldwyn even built a replica of the Fort Grand Opera House, where Lillie Langtry once made an appearance. For the range war between the cattlemen and the homesteaders, local cowboys rounded up 7,000 head of cattle, the largest herd ever put onscreen up to that time.

Wyler wanted to cast his new bride—Margaret “Talli” Tallichet, whom he married in 1938—as Jane-Ellen Mathews, but Goldwyn would not hear of it. He wanted to use an unknown actress, Doris Davenport, whom Goldwyn thought was marvelous in a recent screen test Wyler had done. Though Wyler considered her sweet but untalented, he yielded to Goldwyn's demands. Davenport made no impression in the role, and she never appeared in another film.

The shoot was not easy. Wyler's assistant, Freda Rosenblatt, recalled, “We'd get up at six in the morning and drive eight miles out of town to the set. There would be snow and ice on the ground. By ten the sun would come out and we'd bake. We'd shoot till sundown…. Lots of times Willy would want a rewrite for the next day. The crew, including Willy didn't get much sleep.”
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Wyler finished filming
The Westerner
in November but did not complete postproduction work until January. One difficulty was Goldwyn's desire to print the film in a sepia tint, to which Wyler vigorously objected. He felt that sepia “tends to destroy realism which we are striving for in this picture.” He went on to point out that sepia gets tiresome after three or four reels and that it had ruined
Of Mice and Men.
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Wyler was still arguing against the use of this technique as late as August, when he conceded that sepia might make the outdoor scenes more attractive but would ruin the realistic effect in the interior scenes.

Sepia printing was still an issue as late as August in part because Goldwyn had delayed the picture by asking Alfred Newman to redo Dmitri Tiomkin's score. The question of the music had been raised April, when Tiomkin urged Goldwyn not to be swayed by “some jealous hirelings about the merit of my score.”
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But Goldwyn was clearly dissatisfied, and he insisted that the picture be rescored.
The Westerner
was finally released in September 1940, just two months before
The Letter
, which Wyler had begun filming for Warner Brothers in May.

The Westerner
is an unusual, uneven, eccentric film. It has some of the elements that have come to be associated with classic westerns—particularly the subject of territorial expansion and the struggles between settler-landowners, who wanted to fence off their claims, and cattlemen, who wanted to keep the ranges open. In some important respects, it follows the pattern of what Richard Slotkin calls the “historical romance.” These films, Slotkin notes, are “relentlessly progressive: in their reading of history, celebrating all persons, tendencies, and crises that yield…more civilized forms of society.”
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Yet the film's center is what might be called the love story between Judge Roy Bean, a crude, hard-drinking tyrant who represents “the law west of the Pecos” in the wide-open, anarchic 1880s, and Cole Hardin, a laconic drifter who gets dragged into Bean's court on the charge of stealing a horse. Their relationship seems like the prototype for that between Judah Ben-Hur and Messala, which Wyler would direct twenty years later. The bond between the two is also the basis for a great deal of humor—despite the film's lofty thematic aims, the characters talk more than they act, and
The Westerner
is among the funniest westerns of the period. Indeed, Wyler was attracted primarily by the comic elements: “There was subtle comedy in there. It gave me the opportunity to do some improvising in the scenes between Cooper and Brennan,”
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which are the high points of the film.

The film opens, as do other historical films of the period, with a rolling title. The time frame is after the Civil War, the setting of many classic westerns. The title sequence also heralds a time of renewal: “After the Civil War, America in the throes of rebirth set its face West where the land was free.” The title then sets the stage for the conflict between the cattlemen and Judge Roy Bean, “who took the law into his own hands” but “left his impress on the history of Texas”—a “tribute to his greatness.” In the conflict between the small farmer and the more powerful cattleman who is represented by Judge Bean, there may be an allusion to the Depression era's Dust Bowl conflict between small farmers and banks.

The discrepancy between Bean's historical status and his portrayal in the film is one of the principal problems. Goldwyn, who wanted the film to be endorsed by some of Texas's prominent politicians, was sensitive to the need to depict the local hero in a favorable light. The opening title was no doubt added later, along with the map of Texas at the end, to gain their approval. These additions obviously satisfied the Texans, who allowed Goldwyn to premiere the film in Fort Worth and hold a parade down its main street.

The presentation of Bean was also a bone of contention among the film's contributors and studio executives. Oliver La Farge, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and western historian who was hired to advise on the script, felt that it would be a mistake to turn Bean into a comic figure and poke fun at his court. In fact, he wrote in his notes on the script, “As the original script correctly states, he never forgot his family's long tradition of service in the cause of justice. His court is irregular, rough, frontier, informal, but it must not be comic, and above all it must not give the impression that justice frequently miscarried in it.”
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But one of the first scenes in the film shows Bean condemning a homesteader to hang for mistakenly shooting a steer, and as depicted by Wyler, Bean's court is a place where justice is regularly “miscarried.”

In his notes on the Swerling-Busch script, Jock Lawrence echoes La Farge. He comments that Bean came as a pioneer to a lawless country: “No law officer or judge has dared come into this territory. Bean believes Texas' future lies in cattle. He has
had
to take law into his own hands to put some order into this lawless country.”
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Lawrence believed that Hardin had to be torn between the validity of Bean's argument and that of the settlers, but the film never portrays this conflict as effectively as it should. Wyler's Bean is too comic and too indifferent to human life for an audience to sympathize with his pioneer values.
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Later in the film, Cole makes the case for Bean's values even better than Bean does. Bean's point of view is that he and his kind are responsible for transforming the wilderness into an economically viable open range. He argues for rugged individualism and the right to profit. Unfortunately, he cannot see beyond his own historical moment.
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