William Wyler (9 page)

After the exterior shot of the building, Wyler cuts to the elevator, from which a mailman emerges on Simon's floor. The camera pauses on the office door and then follows the mailman into the waiting room, where it pauses again at the switchboard, which is buzzing with activity. Surveying the waiting room, Wyler immediately establishes the ethnic flavor of the firm's clients. Two men who wait for Mr. Tedesco converse in Italian. The arrival of Mrs. Chapman (Mayo Methot) to see Mr. Simon creates a flurry. Her recent acquittal in a notorious murder case is revealed as Wyler cuts away to a newspaper photograph of her behind bars. She is obviously a wealthy celebrity client—the kind that gravitates to Simon, who is clearly the star of the firm and whose entrance is anticipated by everyone.

While Mrs. Chapman is accepting the congratulations of the staff and is being gawked at by the other clients, Wyler keeps Mrs. Becker (Malka Kornstein) in focus at the rear of the frame. The audience will learn later that she is from Simon's old neighborhood and that her son has been arrested as a communist agitator. Her modest presence attests to her outsider status; she quietly observes Mrs. Chapman's celebrity but is clearly not part of that world. This distinction is underscored when Mrs. Chapman, looking around for a seat, refuses to share the couch where Mrs. Becker sits, selecting another seat instead. During the course of this rapidly cut sequence, Wyler introduces Mr. McFadden, a working-class Irishman and a former client who now works for Simon. The audience also gets glimpses of Weinberg's office, Tedesco's office (his back is to the camera), and Rexy's office. Simon's office, which we see before he enters, is grand, spacious, and modern, with a view of the New York skyline. As Rexy enters to put some papers on Simon's desk, Wyler moves his camera away from her to magnify the space. Then he cuts away to watch as Simon finally arrives through his private entrance from the lobby. The important business of the day can now begin.

Wyler's strategy is to introduce various classes and ethnic types either in separate frames or in deep focus because this diverse clientele represents the new and emerging America. George Simon, who embodies American power and capitalist enterprise, but who also arrived in steerage not so long ago, is the one figure who can potentially bring this disparate group together. Perhaps his combination of business acumen and working-class compassion will be the tonic that can restore America's luster.

This more deliberately social and political emphasis may be Wyler's way of compensating for the casting of John Barrymore as a Jewish immigrant. As discussed earlier, Rice softened the anti-Semitic aspects of his play by not developing their implications. The play, however, had a distinctly Jewish actor in the lead; the film does not. This difference becomes problematic in the film during Lena Simon's visits to her son's office. Clara Langsner plays her as an exaggerated version of the doting Jewish mother, and her performance seems even more overplayed today because overuse has made the Jewish mother syndrome a cliché. Her scenes with Barrymore verge on the ludicrous, as do those in which Simon's stepchildren show disdain for his “Jewishness” and then happily go off to lunch with their mother's lover, Roy Darwin (Melvyn Douglas, who looks no more ethnic than Barrymore).

Nevertheless, the film's defects are outweighed by its considerable strengths. Despite Barrymore's inept “Jewishness,” he delivers one of his best performances for the screen. Pauline Kael wrote that it “revealed his measure as an actor.”
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Margot Peters summed up Barrymore's experience on the film and his contribution to it: “Jack's fast, abrasive, angry, and very moving performance reflects the harassment he suffered while filming it even as it testifies to the histrionic powers of an almost finished actor.”
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Barrymore's George Simon is best seen as a character caught between the simple values he learned as a poor kid growing up in humble circumstances and the pressures of realizing and inhabiting his brilliant success. He embodies the typical American success story, with its attendant anxiety and heartbreak. As a lawyer, George veers between representing wealthy clients in high-profile cases for exorbitant fees and dispensing free legal advice to the poor. He is a sympathetic character in both the stage and film versions, despite some underhanded dealings, such as taking advantage of insider stock tips to make a quick profit for himself and his partner. Such opportunism is tempered, however, by his generosity: he gives money to Mrs. Becker to buy groceries, bails her son out of jail, and then pays for his funeral.

The plot revolves around two central stories. George discovers that he is in danger of disbarment because a rival lawyer, Francis Clark Baird, has discovered that years earlier George went along with a client's perjured testimony. George did so only because he hoped his client, Breitstein, could be rehabilitated, but he gets no sympathy from his wife, Cora, who worries how a scandal will affect her social life. She is also annoyed by her husband's associations with lower-class characters and implores him to act more like a “gentleman.” George's attempts to save his career and his marriage form the focal points of the plot. His career is saved thanks to McFadden's underhanded discovery that Baird is having an affair, but his joy is short-lived when he learns that his wife is leaving for Europe with Roy Darwin. Devastated, he is about to jump out his office window when he is stopped by Rexy, who is secretly in love with him. Then the phone rings, bringing news of a new wealthy client in desperate need of his help. Reinvigorated by the prospect of work, he leaves with Rexy to meet his new client.

The audience, no doubt, feels that George's blackmailing of Baird is justified and that he is better off without his society wife and her awful children. A potential union with the compassionate, working-class Rexy (who also gets along with his mother) seems designed to put George in better touch with his true nature and create a more enduring partnership. George, the ending implies, will maintain the lucrative side of his practice, while his relationship with Rexy will solidify his commitment to the working class and the disadvantaged. Roosevelt's vision of a more inclusive America has a chance to succeed.

Wyler shared with other American artists a sense of optimism in the midst of doom: the system was collapsing, but out of the rubble, maybe something better could be built. Wyler had seen his own childhood collapse amid the devastation of World War I, and now, a mere decade after arriving in America, he saw its vaunted system careening out of human control. But the 1930s gave rise to a new cultural radicalism in America, as many came to believe that they could affect their own future. Committing oneself to a cause, regardless of its philosophy, became a form of salvation.

The attitudes and ideologies that were taking root in the 1930s had their basis in the criticisms of American capitalism arising in the previous decade. The breakdown of the country's industrial network was, for artists and intellectuals, a symptom of a more significant problem. The Depression confirmed their belief that competition and acquisitiveness were eroding the country's social foundation. America was losing or had already lost a sense of cohesiveness and community. James Rorty observed in 1932 that the United States “has everything needed for comfortable survival except a definition of human life.”
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Wyler's George Simon is a man who must put aside his preoccupation with “making it” in order to see what a meaningful human life can be.

Wyler's visual strategy for developing this theme can be traced in a few key scenes. Early in the film, Simon is visited in his office by his wife and his mother. The sequence opens in the lobby, where Roy Darwin is waiting for an elevator and Cora Simon emerges from one. They talk about one of George's high-profile cases—the Crayfield divorce—which Darwin has asked him to drop because it would embarrass the socially prominent Mrs. Crayfield. Then Darwin invites Cora to join him for lunch, and she accepts. The banter is comfortable and casual, and Wyler films them standing face-to-face in two-shots.

Next Wyler cuts to the switchboard, then to Cora in Rexy's office, where she is making calls to arrange the details of an upcoming cruise. Wyler cuts again to the outer office as George's mother Lena enters and sits on the couch without identifying herself. While she waits, Mrs. Simon is greeted by McFadden, a friend from the old neighborhood, who tells her that George has given him a job at the firm. Mrs. Simon beams when she hears about her son's good deeds. Wyler also films this scene in two-shots, but here the characters sit close to each other on the couch; their relationship is tender and affectionate. This framing is repeated when Peter Malone—like McFadden, distinctly ethnic—enters and sits with Mrs. Simon on the couch, holding her hand and talking about her son. Again, the voluble, convivial nature of these unpretentious characters is emphasized. When George appears, he embraces his mother and kisses her affectionately, further emphasizing the close bond he shares with these common people.

As George walks his mother into his office, they are framed by the blinds and the partition of Rexy's office, where Cora is making her phone calls. The class bonds that separate Cora from mother and son are thus rendered visually. In George's office, Mrs. Simon sits on the couch close to George, who is munching on chocolates, and she chides him about spoiling his appetite. Here, as in the waiting-room scene, the framing connotes a connection between these characters, their closeness suggesting affection and love. When Lena brings up the subject of George's dissolute brother who has just passed a bad check, he gets up, paces the office, and yells at his mother, refusing her pleas for help. Despite their disagreement, what Wyler evokes in this exchange is the characters' ability to express themselves passionately and fervently.

Cora and Mrs. Simon then meet briefly in the office. The mood is formal and cold as the two women stand face-to-face; then Cora lights a cigarette. Here Wyler uses some shot-reverse shots—abrupt cuts that he does not employ in any other scenes featuring George's mother. In parting, Mrs. Simon formally shakes Cora's hand and wishes her a pleasant trip. Cora stays to intervene on behalf of Mrs. Crayfield. The ensuing scene in which Cora asks George for a favor lacks any of the intimacy or passion of his mother's plea on behalf of his brother. George and Cora are presented in a two-shot, but rather than sitting close together, George sits on the edge of his desk and Cora sits in a chair. Their speech is even and formal. When Cora declares that she wished George “practiced law like a gentleman,” he moves away from her toward a window, no longer facing his wife. Cora's reference to her husband's lower-class origins obviously stings—to her, apparently, he is no better than his brother, a petty criminal. Still, he decides to accede to her request and drops the Crayfield case, much to Rexy's disgust. (Wyler cuts to a close-up of her face as George tells her to draw up the papers.) George then asks Cora if he now rates a kiss, and Wyler quickly cuts away from them as the sequence ends.

Wyler emphasizes these points in another paired sequence, this time featuring Cora Simon's children and Harry Becker, the communist agitator. Cora arrives at the office and leaves her children seated in the waiting room, where Harry also sits with his mother. The children are condescending to the workers in the office, and their attitude is not lost on Harry. At one point, when young Richard asks one of the staff to fetch him a magazine, Wyler cuts to Harry's back and then to the children's point of view as he looms over them in a low-angle shot. The children are clearly frightened.

That sequence is interrupted by a shot of Cora waiting in George's office. Wyler places her in a long shot, dwarfed by the office's space. He will replicate that shot with one of George after Cora leaves, and again at the end of the film when he realizes that his marriage is falling apart. George enters and confides to Cora that he is facing disbarment; she is only marginally interested. Again, Wyler films their exchange in a two-shot, and again, they do not touch. Their exchange is formal and cold. Cora's only concern is being involved in a scandal, and George is clearly crushed by her indifference when she insists on leaving for Europe without him.

After she leaves, Harry Becker is ushered in. As their confrontation begins, George is getting his shoes shined, and his back is to Harry. During their exchange, Wyler uses two-shots featuring Harry's blurred, slightly out-of-focus face in the front of the frame, with an in-focus George lecturing him. Harry rejects George's help and says he is not grateful that George bailed him out of jail. His reference to the police as “Cossacks” gets George's goat—he refuses to accept the comparison between America and Russia. When Harry accuses him of being on the wrong side of the class war, George launches into a speech of his own. Wyler moves the camera in on him, isolating him in the frame as he speaks of his origins: “Do you think I don't know what it is to sweat and to freeze and to go hungry?…Don't you come around me with any of your half-baked Communist bull and expect me to fall for it.”

Wyler's framing seems to give George the upper hand until he cuts to Harry, who rises, towering over the seated George, and accuses him of being “a traitor to his class” and “getting in right with crooked politicians and crooked corporations that feed on the blood and sweat of the workers.” George takes all this sitting down, but when Harry calls Cora a “kept parasite,” he rises up to face him. Harry keeps going, however, calling Cora's children “pampered brats.” During this exchange, Harry faces the camera, while George stands with his back to it. When Harry spits on the floor and leaves, George remains facing away from the camera. He has been defeated, and he knows it. Later, when he realizes that Cora has betrayed him, all Harry's accusations will be confirmed.

Counsellor-at-Law
is an assured film, expertly made and beautifully acted. It features rapid cutting as Wyler matches his film's style to the fast pace of the play. He employs some expressive camera movements and framings to accentuate the social and political aspects of the play he has chosen to forefront. Although
Counsellor
does not display the hallmark of Wyler's mature style, which emphasizes staging scenes in depth during extended dialogue scenes and thus eliminating the need to cut back and forth, it is a model of his ability to use editing, with some in-depth stagings, to bring a stage piece vividly to life on the screen.