William Wyler (44 page)

I can answer unequivocally that film-making will be, and in fact already is, seriously complicated by the “Un-American” probers. I do not envy you your job of having to sit through the pictures that will be made to conform to Mr. Thomas or Mr. Hearst's standards of entertainment and Americanism. As one who has always regarded motion pictures as an important part of American cultural life, and as one who has constantly advocated and encouraged good films about contemporary life and problems, you must be as outraged as I am by these vicious attacks against the film industry.
¹⁹

It was in response to this national cultural crisis that Wyler undertook the task of filming Sidney Kingsley's play
Detective Story
. Wyler became interested in this project as early as 1948, when Kingsley asked him to invest $1,500 in the Broadway production. Kingsley loved Wyler's film version of his play
Dead End
and looked forward to another successful collaboration. In May 1950, three months before he started filming
Carrie
, Wyler announced that
Detective Story
would be his next project for Paramount.

As he had done with
Dead End
, Wyler asked Kingsley to write the screenplay, but the playwright declined for the same reason he had cited earlier—an unwillingness to go back over the same material he had just finished writing. Wyler then offered the assignment to Dashiell Hammett, who was living in California with Lillian Hellman. Broke and in poor health, Hammett was being hounded by the HUAC, and Wyler wanted to give him a job. Hammett was unable to come up with anything, so Wyler turned the writing duties over to his brother, Robert (who also served as associate producer), and Philip Yordan (whose previous writing credits included
Dillinger, Suspense
, and
Anna Lucasta)
.

Detective Story
opened on Broadway on March 23, 1949, eventually becoming the second-longest-running play of Kingsley's career at 581 performances—eclipsed only by
Dead End's
684 performances. The new play starred Ralph Bellamy and Meg Mundy, and it was directed by Kingsley, who had also staged
Dead End
. Like his earlier successes,
Detective Story
offers a didactic plot, in this case centered on Jim McLeod, a fascistic, intolerant police officer whose marriage and job are both adversely affected by his callous treatment of the suspects he deals with. (Kingsley would return to the subject of fascism in his adaptation of
Darkness at Noon
in 1951.) But this play represents an artistic advance over Kingsley's earlier successes, in that the message does not overwhelm the story. Kingsley's command of dramatic pacing and his attention to the unities of time (the story takes place over a four-hour period), place (limited to the second floor of a police precinct), and action create a vivid portrait of a day in a New York City police station.

Thematically, the play revolves around McLeod's treatment of two criminals. Arthur Kindred, a former navy war hero, is brought in for stealing $480 from his boss. He admits to the crime, explaining that he was driven to it by his love for a woman named Joy and his desire to take her out on an expensive date and buy her things, and he is willing to pay the penalty. There are moments in the play when Arthur discusses his problems adjusting to civilian life—a theme that obviously appealed to Wyler. During his time at the police station, Arthur discovers that Joy's sister, Susan, truly loves him when she arranges to repay the money to Arthur's boss, who then agrees to drop the charges. Despite Arthur's military record and evident good character, McLeod refuses the offer, treating Arthur like any other criminal.

McLeod's second case involves an abortionist named Schneider, whose sloppy practices have killed several young women. McLeod has been after him for some time, and when he learns that his key witness against the man has died—another victim of the doctor's incompetence—he beats Schneider, sending him to the hospital. McLeod then finds out that his own wife, Mary, used Schneider's services years before she met her husband. Mary tries to explain the situation, but McLeod refuses to understand, exclaiming that her affair and subsequent abortion represent “everything I hate” and even calling her a “whore.” His unyielding attitude drives Mary away, and he ignores all advice to try to get her back. Following his final confrontation with Mary, a thief who was arrested earlier takes a gun from one of the policemen at the station, and McLeod is shot trying to retrieve it. Before he dies, however, he relents and lets Arthur go, suddenly realizing the cost of his lack of humanity.

In this play, Kingsley tries to move away from agitprop by melding social drama with tragedy. McLeod is a larger-than-life, charismatic figure who is undone by a moral flaw, and in part, the play hinges on an incident, buried in the past, that comes to light and destroys the lives of McLeod and his wife. Kingsley, however, is not a good enough playwright to bring it off. His characters remain stubbornly one-dimensional, lacking the depth and complexity necessary to lift
Detective Story
from the level of effective melodrama to that of compelling theater.

In a preface written for a paperback reprint of his major plays, Kingsley states that his visit to a police precinct house provided the thematic impetus for the play: “I saw that the measure of a free society can be taken right there in the police station in the relation of police activity to constitutional law.” He goes on to note, “In writing
Detective Story
, I was influenced by General George C. Marshall's speeches in 1947 in which he used the phrase ‘the police state.'”
²⁰
Kingsley also points out a second level to the play:

I took as my premise “Judge not, but ye be judged” from the Sermon on the Mount…. The central figure…is a moralist, wanting to bolster a collapsing civilization by turning back the clock….

…He wants to achieve efficiency by taking the law into his own hands, by making people abide by the right as he sees it, or by personally bringing them to account if they do not. Of course, the inefficiency comes from our checks and balances, so that no man can be trusted with absolute power. The answer to McLeod is that the inefficiency of humankind is really a higher efficiency, since it permits the human spirit to breathe.
²¹

The parallels between McLeod's authoritarian approach to law enforcement and the unwillingness of the HUAC and its supporters to let America or its artists “breathe” were certainly not lost on Kingsley—and they surely account for the alacrity with which Wyler took on the project and the speed with which he finished it. Wyler completed
Detective Story
in only three months—a record for him.

Having encountered problems with the Breen office over
Carrie
, Wyler again faced difficulties with
Detective Story
, over the subject of abortion. In an interview with the
New York Times
, he lashed out against the Production Code:

Certain subjects can't even be discussed. It's as if they didn't exist. The play forcefully condemns abortion and it is proper to insist on condemnation of crime in film. But apparently we are not even permitted to condemn. This is ludicrous. The code is old-fashioned. It is fifteen years old, but the company heads won't hear of amendments. Why not discuss reality? I have two daughters who are more important to me than my pictures. There are many things I wouldn't want them to see. It is my responsibility to keep them from seeing such things. But that doesn't mean it is my responsibility to make pictures for children.
²²

The Breen office was unmoved by Wyler's comments, so the screenwriters were forced to come up with a new plot twist. By changing Dr. Schneider's specialty to the delivery of out-of-wedlock babies and implying that he dabbles in illegal adoptions, they managed to leave the language sufficiently vague yet allow the audience to pick up on the illicit nature of his services. In the film, McLeod learns that his wife's delivery was botched and that the baby died at birth, thus suggesting the reason for Mary's current inability to have a child.
²³
When he learns about her past, he calls her a “tramp”—the play's “whore” was rejected by Breen's office.

The filmmakers also simplified the role of Feinson, a newspaper reporter who hangs around the police station. In the play, he and McLeod are old friends; he calls McLeod “Seamus,” while McLeod calls him “Yussel.” Like McLeod's partner Brody, he functions as an adviser and a conscience, at one point warning, “Sometimes you've got to bend with the wind…or break! Be a little human…. Don't be such a friggin' monument!”
²⁴
In the film, Feinson becomes a minor character, mostly a hanger-on. Otherwise, the film is faithful to the play's plot, characters, and setting.

In casting the film, Wyler retained four actors from the Broadway production: Lee Grant (the shoplifter), Horace McMahon (Lieutenant Monaghan, the precinct chief), and Joseph Wiseman and Michael Strong (a pair of burglars). For McLeod and his wife, he chose Kirk Douglas, who had starred in
Champion
in 1949 and would play another ruthless, destructive character in Billy Wilder's
Ace in the Hole
that same year, and Eleanor Parker, who had received a Best Actress nomination for
Caged
in 1950. He rounded out the cast with Cathy O'Donnell as Susan Carmichael (the woman who loves Arthur) and William Bendix as Joe Brody, McLeod's partner.

Douglas later wrote in his autobiography that he had “misgivings” about doing the film: “I had seen the play in New York with Ralph Bellamy starring. It had problems. The vignettes and characters were wonderful, but the main character had to lug the story line.” To ensure a more smoothly integrated ensemble, Douglas suggested that Wyler gather the cast and have them “do it as a play. Then you can watch the whole thing…. I put the play together at the Sombrero Playhouse in Phoenix, Arizona. Wyler came to see it several times.”
²⁵
Douglas also spent several weeks at a precinct in Midtown Manhattan, where the detectives dressed him in a uniform, had him sit in on investigations, and even let him fingerprint a burglary suspect. In his autobiography, Douglas called Wyler “a strange director: he never directed you. He'd just say, ‘Do it again,' until he got what he wanted.”
²⁶
In an interview twelve years earlier, however, Douglas had different opinion, ranking Wyler among the five best directors he had ever worked with.
²⁷

As was his wont, Wyler shot most of the film indoors. Except for a few brief exterior shots of the street outside the station and a paddy-wagon ride with back projection of city streets, the action took place on a single sound stage that housed the squad room, the lieutenant's office, an interrogation room, a file room, and the building's roof. The multilevel set was an illusion, as Wyler had all the rooms built side by side to accommodate cameraman Lee Garmes's traveling camera. Garmes recalled:

I told him to find a stage with smooth floors at Paramount; if there were any holes in them he must fill them up with putty and sandpaper them. I told him I'd use a crab dolly; he'd never used it before and he was delighted with the idea of a camera he could move wherever he wanted it…and I told him to rehearse the actors while I rehearsed the camera and lights at the same time; if I made too much noise he was to tell me. And then I suggested to him that stills be made of each final rehearsal with the dialogue attached each time, so as to speed up the actual shots. Willy had a ball with the crab dolly! We came in six days under schedule, a record for him.
²⁸

Detective Story
is similar in style to
Counsellor-at-Law
, which also takes place on a single set (George Simon's law office). But in the film version of Rice's play, Wyler manages to avoid any feeling of confinement through his fast-paced direction and skillful movement of the actors between sets. He repeats this effect in filming Kingsley's play by adding rooms to the precinct house and moving his camera and characters freely between those spaces. In doing so, Wyler provides the illusion of ample space where there is, in fact, very little. Michael Anderegg correctly observes that the film “moves like an efficient, well-lubricated machine.”
²⁹

Conversely, Anderegg faults Wyler—less accurately—for “allowing Kingsley's play to speak for itself with as little interference as possible.”
³⁰
In fact, Wyler's introduction of McLeod significantly alters Kingsley's version and immediately complicates the audience's reaction to him. In the film, we meet McLeod outdoors, where he is walking a prisoner to the station house. He is waylaid by his wife; they embrace and talk like newlyweds. He then takes her to a parked taxi, and the cabbie allows them to continue their conversation in the back. When they kiss, Wyler frames the scene much like the one of Hurstwood and Carrie kissing in a carriage, indicating that McLeod's passion for his wife is still strong. He promises that he will be home for dinner and asks about her visit to the doctor. She tells him that things are no different, but McLeod, undeterred, insists that they will confound the medical establishment and have both a boy and a girl. McLeod is thus effectively introduced as a loving husband and popular on the street.
³¹
After leaving his wife, he ascends the staircase—again, a sign of power in Wyler's films—and enters his work area, where he starts to book Arthur Kindred, treating the prisoner in a friendly, civil manner.

When he is called in to Lieutenant Monaghan's office to meet Schneider's attorney, Sims, the audience sees another side of McLeod. Sims is aware of his client's less than savory past with McLeod and is worried about turning him over. He does not want Schneider's constitutional rights violated and he declares that he does not want McLeod to “degrade [Schneider's] dignity as a human being.” After Sims leaves, Monaghan chews out McLeod, objecting to his “moral indignation.” The look on McLeod's face during these scenes is disturbing, but the audience is still with him at this point because Schneider has, after all, been charged with murder, and his lawyer, in his buttoned-up black suit, comes across as officious, while the casually dressed McLeod seems more human. But when Monaghan accuses him of being “a one man army against crime,” McLeod retorts savagely that he wants to put “criminals in the electric chair and pull the switch myself.” Immediately, he realizes he has gone too far and pulls back. Clearly troubled, he walks away from the camera and changes moods.