William Wyler (41 page)

With Montgomery Clift playing Morris, Wyler accomplishes one of his most dramatic shifts from James's—as well as the Goetzes'—version of the story. In the novel, there is no doubt that Dr. Sloper is right about Catherine's suitor, but when Mrs. Montgomery (Morris's sister) warns the doctor, “Don't let her marry him,” Sloper's satisfaction in being right is mitigated by James's suggestion that Sloper's rightness is not always a good thing. In the play, Mrs. Montgomery does not state her opposition so baldly, but she insinuates it by saying, “If you are opposed to the marriage, then as a father you must find a kinder way of stopping it.” Mrs. Montgomery also indicates that she is more concerned about protecting Catherine than Morris. The playwrights even provide a scene between Morris and Aunt Penniman—it was cut for the film—where he admits his fear that Catherine will be disinherited and states his dissatisfaction at being guaranteed only $10,000 a year: “On ten, ma'am, you live like your neighbor…. But thirty is something to look forward to.”
²⁰
In the film, the tenor of Dr. Sloper's interview with Mrs. Montgomery is less ominous. She refuses to censure her brother, and when pushed to say something negative about him, she merely says, “I have to go.” Then, as Dr. Sloper sees her to the door, Wyler catches him in the mirror—the only time in the film—implying his own judgment of Catherine's father.

Wyler enforces the ambiguity of Morris's character by invariably letting him share the frame with others. Only in Morris's strained scenes with Dr. Sloper does the director occasionally resort to the shot–reverse shot. Clift portrays Morris as a likable, charming character, and his very contemporary (and very American) style of acting effectively clashes with Richardson's more classical English style, which makes Morris's American “innocence” seem vulnerable and ingratiating. His evident charm also makes Catherine seem less foolish than she does in either the novel or the play. There is a moment at the end of the party sequence when, as Morris bids good night to Catherine, Wyler's camera stays on the young man in a medium close-up. He looks handsome and hopeful, but Wyler invests the shot with an undertone of mystery and ambiguity by lingering on him so long. This element of mystery endures until the sequence that ends the first part of the film.

Morris's jilting of Catherine is one of the high points of the film both dramatically and stylistically, again demonstrating Wyler's ability to convert a well-developed and structured scene from the stage into a great moment on film. Prior to that sequence, Morris and Catherine meet in the rain (always an ominous sign in a Wyler film) to discuss their elopement. The scene concludes with Catherine telling Morris that they should not expect anything from her father and that she wants nothing from him. Back at home, her departure scene begins as Catherine carries her bags down the stairs, along with a lighted lamp. She is dressed in black, and the room is in shadows. Despite the funereal atmosphere, Catherine is excited—she opens a window, letting in the air and looking out expectantly. Obviously, she feels free—she is about to start a new life.

Next, the lighting seems to change for a moment, and Catherine sits by the round lamp, checking her bag. Reflected in the mirror next to her, the shadows on the stairway undulate as her aunt descends—the sequence looks like something out of a horror film. Aunt Penniman is dressed in light-colored nightclothes, which contrast with Catherine's black coat. Catherine explains to her aunt that she is eloping, and they wait for Morris together. She then informs her aunt of her estrangement from her father, declaring that she will never see him again. When Aunt Penniman asks if she has told Morris that she will be disinherited, Catherine says yes. Her aunt replies, “Oh, you didn't! You shouldn't!” At that moment, they hear the sound of a carriage and Catherine rushes out, framed by the doorway, but it isn't Morris.

Wyler stages the next sequence formally, emphasizing its pictorial and geometric style. Catherine is seen in profile, seated by a column in the sitting room and parallel to her aunt, who is seated near the lamp by the window. Catherine, though anticipating her wedding, is dressed in black, like a widow; her aunt is in white. The color reversal highlights Catherine's betrayal. Both women sit still, a shadow between them. When Catherine finally asks why she shouldn't have told Morris about the money, Aunt Penniman replies, “Oh, dear girl, why were you not a little more clever?” Her aunt's words imply what Catherine must now recognize—that the male-dominated social world is governed by money and power. Aunt Penniman herself has learned to survive in the constricted space she inhabits—after all, she lives in the house at her brother's invitation. Catherine protests that Morris still could have expected $10,000 a year, exclaiming, “It is a great deal of money!” But her aunt replies, “Not when one has expected thirty.” The mise-en-scène of the two women sitting in similar positions unites them. Having learned her painful lesson, Catherine starts to cry, and her aunt closes the doors, as if shielding her from the audience. There is a cut as the camera surveys the hallway, then Catherine emerges with her suitcases. Wyler's camera follows her as she trudges wearily up the stairs, bearing the burdens of her luggage and her new knowledge.

The final half hour of the film reverses the positions of Catherine and her father. Shortly after we see Catherine ascending the stairs, Wyler cuts to Dr. Sloper descending the stairs in the morning. He is clearly weak, his steps uncertain. This is the first time in the film that Dr. Sloper is shown on the staircase, his downward progress symbolizing his loss of power. There is a cut to Catherine embroidering—according to her father, it is her only talent—and again she is reflected in a mirror in profile. The camera holds this shot longer than usual: Catherine's face is grim and determined, and the static framing suggests that she may be stronger than her father now, but rather than liberating her, this newly acquired knowledge and power have imprisoned her. When Aunt Penniman comes in, she has now assumed the black cloak that Catherine was wearing the night before.

The following scene opens with Dr. Sloper in his study, performing a self-examination. The room, in contrast to its appearance in the first part of the film, is now dark, and the curtains are drawn. Apparently having determined that he will die soon, the doctor gives Maria, the house keeper, and Catherine instructions to prepare his sick room, whereupon Maria begins to cry, but Catherine shows no emotion. Dr. Sloper then learns from Catherine that she will not be leaving home after all. This scene takes place in front of a lighted window. Sloper hopes that Catherine has broken off the engagement, and she uses Morris's abandonment to turn the tables on her father, undercutting him with her words as effectively as he did her, earlier. She taunts him by exposing his contempt for her: “You have cheated me. You thought that any handsome, clever man would be as bored by me as you were…. It was not love that made you protect me. It was contempt.” She goes on to say, “I don't know that Morris would have hurt me or starved me for affection more than you did.”
²¹
When Catherine taunts him further, offering to help him rewrite his will when he threatens to change it, Wyler composes the scene by placing Sloper at the front of the frame, emphasizing his pain and grief. Catherine then moves to his side, repeating the two-shot pattern of her early scenes with Morris—only now, the framing emphasizes her cruelty. At this point, the audience's sympathy shifts to Dr. Sloper. Whereas in James's novel, Sloper takes satisfaction in being right about Morris's motives, Wyler's character takes no such pleasure, and the humiliation inflicted by his child feels unnecessarily cruel. He exits with dignity through the same doors that Aunt Penniman closed for Catherine, and we see him for the last time outlined by the door frame as he climbs the stairs toward his death.

The scene dealing with Dr. Sloper's death is Wyler's final sequence outside the house. The camera finds Catherine, in profile, seated on a park bench, looking stern. Maria emerges from the house, announcing that her father is asking for her. Again in profile—the positioning recalls her placement at her embroidery frame after she is jilted—Catherine tells Maria that she will not see him. (In the novel, she tends to her father until he dies, and there is no such scene in the play.) In the film, Catherine's refusal to react to her father's impending death recalls Regina's coldhearted forbearance in
The Little Foxes
, when she lets Horace die as he tries to climb the stairs to get his medicine. In that scene, Wyler focuses on Regina's determined and emotionless face. Here, in another deep-focus sequence, Catherine remains seated on the bench while, in the rear of the frame, Maria turns from the doorway of the house to see if her mistress has changed her mind. Catherine sits, unmoved.

Her final meeting with Morris begins with the estranged couple facing each other in profile, much like the early scenes between daughter and father. When Catherine finally invites Morris to sit, he faces her while she looks steadily toward the camera, working at her embroidery. Unlike in the early scenes of his courtship, Morris now finds himself unable to penetrate her space. Nonetheless, Catherine agrees to marry him that night, and Morris leaves to pack. Closing the curtains and returning to her embroidery, Catherine remarks to her aunt, her voice dripping with hatred: “He's grown greedier with the years. The first time he only wanted my money, now he wants my love too.” Later, when Morris calls for her, Catherine is shown again in profile, surrounded by her embroidery frame and the round, lighted lamp. She instructs Maria to bolt the door, and at the sound of the bolt being drawn, Catherine cuts the thread on her embroidery, signaling that she is finished. Again in profile, she picks up the lamp and ascends the stairs as Morris pounds on the door, calling her name. Catherine is now wearing white, as if signaling that, by cutting herself off from her lone suitor, she is finally wed to a life divorced from everyone.

The Heiress
opened at Radio City Music Hall after Paramount ran a series of high-toned ads celebrating Wyler and the film—one ad trumpeting, “The Greatness of ‘The Heiress' Is the Paramount Achievement of William Wyler.” The film did well in New York and received excellent reviews. Bosley Crowther of the
New York Times
commented, “Not many film producers are able to do the sort of thing that William Wyler has done with ‘The Heiress,' the mordant stage play of two seasons back. For Mr. Wyler has taken this drama, which is essentially of the drawing-room and particularly of an era of stilted manners and rigid attitudes, and has made it into a motion picture that crackles with allusive life and fire in its tender and agonized telling of an extraordinary characterful tale.”
²²
The film later had another prestige opening at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Hollywood.

Outside of New York, however, the film did not do so well, although it eventually earned a profit. Wyler was disappointed. He told
Variety
, “I expected it to make a lot of money. It cost too much. It should have been done cheaper. But then it wouldn't have been the same picture. As it was, I didn't go over the estimated budget by more than sixty to seventy thousand dollars.”
²³
Years later, Wyler reflected that perhaps he had made Morris too sympathetic: “He's got to be convincing to her or she looked like a fool. And he was so convincing that when it turned out that he was after her money it was such a disappointment…. That the audience was so disappointed, you know not getting a happy ending to this beautiful couple…. I went too far this way…I don't know what happened.”
²⁴
Still,
The Heiress
garnered eight Academy Award nominations, including for Best Picture and Best Director. It eventually received four Oscars: a Best Actress win for Olivia de Havilland (her second), one for Aaron Copland's score, and awards for costume design and art direction.

The Heiress
ranks among Wyler's singular achievements, and it remains one of the best examples (along with
The Little Foxes)
of how to adapt a play to the screen. Like all his great work, this film shows off Wyler's ability to create “action” out of internal struggles and crises. In service to that aim, he masterfully orchestrates his actors within restricted space and skillfully utilizes mundane objects such as lamps, clothing, doors, and windows to great visual and symbolic effect. He creates powerful dramatic moments by means of formal staging and long, expressive takes, especially in the scene of Catherine's abandonment by Morris. Indeed, this sequence ranks among Wyler's highest achievements, along with the Olympus Ball in
Jezebel
, the death of Horace in
The Little Foxes
, Baby Face Martin's meeting with Francey in
Dead End
, and others in which rich dramatic tension is created through gestures, subtle acting moments, and careful attention to composition.
The Heiress
is a worthy successor to
The Best Years of Our Lives
—despite the differing eras and social strata portrayed, both films explore the dehumanizing effects of money on human relationships.

Carrie
(1952)

Carrie
, Wyler's film of Theodore Dreiser's 1900 novel
Sister Carrie
, is in theme and outlook a logical successor to
The Heiress
. There is a moment early in Dreiser's novel when eighteen-year-old Carrie Meeber, a poor girl from a small town, is escorted to a posh Chicago restaurant by Charles Drouet, a salesman and “masher” she has met on the train. Carrie is dazzled by the selection of food, the clothing of the patrons, and the décor—much as Morris Townsend is overwhelmed by the Slopers' richly appointed Washington Square home. “She felt a little out of place but the great room soothed her and the view of the well-dressed throng outside seemed a splendid thing. Ah, what was it not to have money! What a thing it was to come here and dine!”
¹
Sister Carrie
, which was condemned and then almost suppressed by its publisher because its central characters defy conventional morality, appeared only twenty years after
Washington Square.
And though the worlds of James and Dreiser are far apart, both share an interest in their characters' preoccupation with money and position. Like Morris Townsend, Carrie Meeber is motivated by a powerful desire for security, money, and pleasure. Wyler was no doubt attracted to the property because, like many of his earlier projects, it focused on social problems that were still prevalent in American society.

Wyler first expressed interest in
Sister Carrie
in 1947, when he asked Lillian Hellman if she would be interested in writing a screenplay based on the novel. She was enthusiastic about undertaking the adaptation, but other projects intervened, and she began to lose interest. At one point, Robert Wyler suggested Julius and Phillip Epstein as possible screenwriters, and in 1949 Wyler asked for Hellman's help in interesting Arthur Miller in the project, but Miller was too busy with other work. Hellman also suggested Norman Mailer, whose first novel,
The Naked and the Dead
, had made him the newest literary sensation, but Wyler preferred to work with an older writer and a dramatist rather than a novelist.
²
Finally, he decided to rehire Ruth and Augustus Goetz—signing them up before
The Heiress
even opened—and he had a treatment in hand by the end of May 1949.

By the end of that year, Wyler was sufficiently satisfied with the script to begin looking for a cast. Hoping to engage Laurence Olivier to play Hurstwood, he cabled his brother Robert in London and had him deliver a copy of the script to the actor. Since starring in
Wuthering Heights
for Wyler in 1939, Olivier had become a considerable presence in films—his screen version of
Hamlet
won him an Oscar for Best Actor in 1948, as well as a Best Director nomination, and the film was named Best Picture. He had recently been named director of the St. James Theatre in London, where he was preparing to direct and star in Christopher Fry's
Venus Observed
. He cabled Wyler his regrets, citing his commitment to the play, which would be one of the hits of the London season. Wyler, however, refused to take no for an answer and offered to change his schedule to accommodate the actor. Paramount even had Dreiser's widow, Helen, write to Olivier, calling him “the greatest dramatic intellect of his time” and praising his film versions of
Henry V
and
Hamlet.
³
When Vivien Leigh was offered the lead in A
Streetcar Named Desire
, Olivier, not wanting to be separated from his wife, accepted Wyler's offer to come to Hollywood. He was paid $125,000 for the role, and Paramount agreed to pay him an additional $1,000 a week to cover the costs of, among other things, a chauffeur, a car, and a maid.

For Carrie, Wyler wanted Elizabeth Taylor. She was eighteen—the right age for the role—and she possessed the arresting beauty that would justify the character's appeal. Taylor had just completed George Stevens's A
Place in the Sun
(an adaptation of Dreiser's
An American Tragedy)
, opposite Montgomery Clift. Wyler asked Olivier to meet her and convince her to take the role. But MGM, which owned Taylor's contract, would not release her. While working on the script with the Goetzes in 1949, Wyler had sent a copy to David O. Selznick, seeking his input, and thereupon found himself inundated with memos, both before and after the film. Above all, Selznick wanted the role of Carrie for his wife, Jennifer Jones. He felt that playing opposite Olivier would enhance her prestige and that working with Wyler would enlarge her sense of craft. When he learned that Wyler had already offered the role to Taylor and that Paramount was then in negotiations with Ava Gardner, he fired off an angry memo to the director: “I must now ask you to consider that Jennifer is not available…. I do not wish further to demean [her] or her great standing as a star by what I am forced to regard as the type of double dealing which has made me so fed up with Hollywood.”
⁴
Wyler apologized, assuring Selznick that no deal had been made with anyone. Selznick then reconsidered his position, and Jones was signed to star in
Carrie
by the end of June.

At first, Olivier was pleased to be working with Jones, but he soon grew impatient with her. In a letter to Vivien Leigh, he vented his frustrations: “No soul, like we always said about them, dumb animals with human brains.”
⁵
Olivier, however, received Wyler's full attention. He made sure that his star was met in New York by the Goetzes, who gave him a tour of the Bowery so that Olivier could see how real derelicts lived, which the director thought would serve the actor well when they filmed the final scenes. Olivier was also concerned about having the right dialect and cabled Wyler from London: “Feel strongly my natural way of speaking quite wrong for Hurstwood who was probably born in Chicago…. Please be kind and line up a man you can trust to check my accent and intonations so I can feel in tune and happy about this.”
⁶
Wyler secured him a coach, and Olivier also made use of Spencer Tracy, who was from the Midwest.

Olivier steeped himself in the role. Elia Kazan recalled “watching Larry go through the pantomime of offering a visitor a chair. He'd try it this way then that, looking at the guest, then at the chair, doing it with a host's flourish, doing it with a graceless gesture, then thrusting it brusquely forward—more like Hurstwood that way?”
⁷
When he came to the sequences in which Hurstwood is starving and begging for money, the actor starved himself. He wrote to Leigh, “I don't feel at all hungry—just as if I'm dying. It's very good for Hurstwood right now.”
⁸

Wyler had managed another casting coup when he signed Eddie Albert for his first dramatic role as Drouet. But early on, Wyler encountered a vexing problem with Ruth Warrick as Mrs. Hurstwood. He had chosen her over Geraldine Fitzgerald and Miriam Hopkins but was not happy with her performance. He fired Warrick after a few days and replaced her with Hopkins, who had just played Aunt Lavinia in
The Heiress
. Hopkins succeeded in embodying the cold, heartless Mrs. Hurstwood with the same expertise she had shown in playing the romantic, eccentric aunt in the earlier film.

Once shooting started, Wyler encountered a major problem with Jennifer Jones, who announced that she was pregnant—a fact that became more obvious as filming progressed. Wyler was irritated, but he tried not to show it. Although he attempted to talk her out of strapping herself into the corsets required for the period costumes, she insisted on wearing them. Jones eventually lost the baby, but her pregnancy was largely responsible for the many close-ups of her face in the film—which was unusual in Wyler's work and was noted by some critics.

Wyler knew that
Sister Carrie
had a troubled history in Hollywood. Joseph Breen, who enforced the film industry's Production Code, had rejected treatments of Dreiser's novel numerous times beginning in 1937, when Warner Brothers expressed interest in filming it, and a year later when Columbia Pictures sent him a film treatment. Breen considered Carrie an immoral woman who goes unpunished, and he found Hurstwood's suicide “morally objectionable” and “bad theatre.”
⁹

Wyler took on the Production Code, pronouncing it “old-fashioned.” He also called for “men of courage” in Hollywood to take on significant material that had so far been avoided: “We need men of courage in high places who will not be intimidated and coerced into making only ‘safe' pictures—pictures devoid of any ideas whatsoever…. The best pictures are made by thinking people who are vitally interested in politics or anything else that has public significance. Our people should be familiar with what is going on in the world unless all they want to make are fairy tales.”
¹⁰
As filming of
Carrie
was about to begin, he told a reporter, “There will be censorship troubles, of course, but that's because of the terrible yardstick applied by the industry.”
¹¹
Dreiser's novel appealed to Wyler because of the director's own feelings about poverty and social justice and the novelist's compelling descriptions of poverty amid the flowering of big business and the triumph of capitalism.
¹²

As indicated in a letter he wrote to the Goetzes,
¹³
both Wyler and his screenwriters were familiar with the adaptation of
Sister Carrie
that Clifford Odets had written for RKO in 1944. As he often did, Odets had reconceived Dreiser's story, establishing Carrie as a determined and ambitious woman in the first sequences. His script opens with the death of Carrie's mother, who is described as the family's breadwinner, while Mr. Meeber is presented as a shiftless, lazy man. (Odets's plays are full of strong mothers and weak fathers.) Before Carrie leaves for Chicago, her mother's former employer (a man of means) proposes marriage, but she refuses. Carrie seems determined to move to the city and make something of herself.

Odets also places more emphasis on Carrie's relationship with her sister's family and her courtship by Drouet. Most important, her interest in the theater is established early on, and Odets gives her an important speech in which she articulates her theory of a more realistic style of acting (Carrie as a forerunner of the Group Theatre?) than the heavily theatrical style she has observed at shows attended with Drouet. One of Odets's most audacious changes is transforming Moy, one of the owners of Fitzgerald and Moy's, the bar/restaurant that Hurstwood manages, into a central figure in the story. Here, he becomes Julia Hurstwood's father as well. Moy admires (and pities) his son-in-law and despises his daughter—in her, he sees the reincarnation of her cold and heartless mother. Nevertheless, he helps his daughter get out of her marriage when, after hiring a detective to follow Hurstwood, he learns of his son-in-law's evolving relationship with Carrie. Despite fulfilling his fatherly obligation to his daughter, Moy is generous to Hurstwood, whom he considers integral to his business and largely responsible for its success. After Hurstwood steals the money and runs off with Carrie, Moy allows him to pay it back in installments and later offers him a partnership in the business if he agrees to leave Carrie. Because Odets's Hurstwood is better at finding jobs than his counterpart in Wyler's film, his decline seems more precipitous. He decides to leave Carrie to allow her to realize her ambitions, which she does by becoming a successful actress. Odets's script ends with Hurstwood killing himself by running into a burning building while Carrie is being courted by Ames, a writer. His death is thus balanced by her success and a blossoming relationship with someone her own age.
¹⁴

The Goetzes scrapped most of Odets's ideas and moved closer to the details of Dreiser's novel. What they retained, however, is the mutual devotion displayed by Hurstwood and Carrie. Odets understood that the film's characters needed to elicit the audience's sympathies in ways that the novel's did not. Dreiser's narrative is not really a love story, even though many of the events recounted resemble a tale of passion and romance. Carrie feels a certain affection for both Drouet and Hurstwood, but her heart never rules her self-interest. In fact, Dreiser's Carrie seems incompletely developed as a character. She simply falls under the sway of superhuman forces, while Hurstwood is the one who exhibits passion. When first introduced, he is at the summit of his career. Well liked and highly regarded, he socializes with the rich and powerful. He has everything to lose by becoming involved with Carrie, especially considering that she is drawn to his wealth and prestige and is not motivated by romance or love. Odets's characters are stronger and more determined, as well as warm and passionate. In his version, Carrie and Hurstwood risk a great deal for each other, and their love endures through the difficulties they experience.

The Goetzes' treatment contains summaries of many scenes that never made it into the final film.
¹⁵
In a letter to Wyler, the screenwriters acknowledge that the treatment is too long (at fifty-two pages), but they note that writing it was a valuable exercise: “From your point of view, this is probably far too long but from ours, it has turned out to be a very useful thing to have done. It has given us the basis for every dramatizable point in the continuity.”
¹⁶
Their treatment spends some time developing Carrie's interest in the theater, and it includes Carrie's debut at an amateur theatrical production at the Elks' Lodge that is attended by Drouet and Hurstwood, a central scene in the novel. Virtually all these scenes were cut from the final script, however. Most important, the treatment devotes significant attention to Hurstwood's decline—including numerous scenes of his rejection for a variety of jobs, as well as his work as a strikebreaker—thus emphasizing his story at the expense of Carrie's.

This imbalance has also been noted in criticism of the novel, where Dreiser certainly depicts Hurstwood's fall in long, detailed sequences that underscore the contrasting fates of the two main characters. Both are struggling to survive in a precarious, materialistic world, and while Hurstwood fails to move ahead, Carrie remains focused on success. As good fortune continues to elude him in New York, Hurstwood increasingly looks back on his lost prosperity and his life in Chicago, now forfeited in the vain pursuit of love. His descent offers a lesson in the fate of a dreamer whose hopes have been destroyed—in this respect, Hurstwood's story is a more extreme version of Catherine Sloper's. In stark contrast, Carrie's story, both in Dreiser's novel and, to a lesser extent, in the Goetzes' treatment, provides an object lesson in success. Hers, however, is not the typical American success story, for Carrie triumphs despite her questionable virtue. There is no correlation in Dreiser's world between social morality and material success.