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Saturday Evening Movie Thread 08/05/2023 [TheJamesMadison]

William Wyler

Film directors tend to get remembered themselves for a couple of different major reasons. The first are people like Alfred Hitchcock, those with extreme authorial stamps that especially extend to the visual aspects of their movies, making them easily identifiable simply by looking at them (there's often a heavy influence from German Expressionism). The second are those who put such a unique thematic stamp, like a Sam Peckinpah, that mere descriptions of their work makes them easily identifiable. And then there are the chameleons like William Wyler.

Born in the German Empire in 1902, he immigrated to America at 19 to work for his cousin, the founder of Universal Pictures, Carl Laemmle. He was soon a director of short westerns and managed the transition from silent films to sound adeptly, steadily gaining power and influence within the industry to where he could produce his own films. His first producing credit was in 1927, but he became a regular producer in 1935 with The Good Fairy, an Ernst Lubitsch-esque comedy that charms wonderfully nearly ninety years later.

What did Wyler do with this kind of power base? Did he go down rabbit holes of stylistic excess? Did he tell increasingly esoteric stories with little appeal beyond his own head? No. What he did was to make a long series of respectable, accomplished, and often touching films, often adapted from stage plays with strong female characters at their center. He wasn't out to mold every project to some particular thematic idea that obsessed him like how every single Scorsese movie is about identity within insular ingroups. He was just there to make good movies, and he was damn good at it.

Just Stories

When I start out watching a series of films all made by the same filmmaker, I'm eagle-eyed searching for any opening threads that I feel like will end up reappearing repeatedly throughout the career. I thought I had something in the earliest Wyler film I could find, the five reel entry in the Blue Streak western series, The Stolen Ranch. It's a film about two WWI veterans who work together to reclaim the titular stolen ranch, and it has this central male bond formed through war. I, of course, remembered The Best Years of Our Lives, which I not only have seen before but had recently rewatched in my revue of Best Picture Winners, and I thought I had my theme from the beginning. And then...it didn't show up again until The Best Years of Our Lives, unless you really want to count Tom Brown of Culver, which doesn't even go to war but is about some bonds through the military formed at a military academy.

From The Love Trap to A House Divided to The Good Fairy to These Three to Dodsworth to Jezebel to Wuthering Heights to The Letter and to The Little Foxes, Wyler's films moved from thematic concern to thematic concern, the primary focus always being the characters. He was just moving around, looking for stories that appealed to him on some level that also appealed to someone like Samuel Goldwyn, his regular producer after he left Universal. It was really just about finding the next interesting story that he could put his best actors into.

I was frustrated at first, wanting that kind of authorial stamp that is fairly easy to see across the careers of many other very talented directors, but here was William Wyler, honestly one of the greatest film directors to ever work at this level, with little to none thematic tissue connecting one movie to the next. There's no evolution of ideas across his career except in small pockets that last for no more than three movies (what I call his pacificism trilogy of Friendly Persuasion, The Big Country, and Ben-Hur is the most prominent example). What does that leave me to talk about?

Craft

Really what combines all of Wyler's films is the consummate craft he brought to every aspect of the production. One thing I noticed in his very early career was that no matter what writing team he was working with, he was making films within genres popular at the time (westerns, boxing movies, military academy films) with extremely sophisticated uses of character to drive the storytelling that made them more than just more entries. Take, for example, Hell's Heroes, his adaptation of the story 3 Godfathers that John Ford would later make in a film starring John Wayne. The titular heroes in Wyler's version are all terrible people, violent thieves who argue about who is going to, shall we say, take advantage of the dying woman they find in the desert, but the journey they end up going through to save a little baby changes them, especially the central character, so convincingly that there is real emotional catharsis at the end. That happens because of Wyler's approach to character.

Another thing I noticed fairly early (though this took a bit longer to develop) was Wyler's extremely sophisticated eye for visual composition within the frame. I first noticed this when I first saw The Big Country several years ago, so I was looking for it from the beginning. The Stolen Ranch didn't have it, but by Hell's Heroes that eye for placing characters and objects into frame in ways that implied relationships, power, and sometimes just for aesthetics was burgeoning. It didn't matter if he was working with Greg Tolland (who also lensed Orson Welles' Citizen Kane) or Leo Tover or Lee Garmes as his cinematographer, Wyler got those intricate visual framings.

Those visual framings were defined by an innate understanding that the frame is actually three-dimensional. You don't need special 3-D glasses in order to appreciate that one person is closer to the frame than another, you just need to use some level of deep focus. As time has gone on and film language has steadily degraded, it's often to the point when I feel like directors and cinematographers think that the frame actually has no dimensions at all. Three dimensions uses depth. Two dimensions would use up and down, left and right. One dimension would use action moving along a line within the frame. Most of what I see are a series of closeups with only a single point of reference in a frame, implying no dimensional knowledge at all. Wyler and whatever cinematographer he was working with (his best work was when he was working with Tolland like on The Little Foxes) used movement left and right, spacing up and down, and positioning front and back. There are shots where one figure is on the second story of a set of stairs (he loved that kind of interior set), another is on the ground floor nearer the camera, and someone else is in the middle distance, all three figures (sometimes as many as six or more, to be honest) in focus as the scene plays out, never overlapping except in moments of transition within the frame before settling on a new composition where everyone is, once again, in full view and perfect focus.

That kind of series of setups requires a lot of work, time, and money. You have to light the entire set, not just setting up a key light for one actor and a fill light. You have to practice so that everyone hits their marks. And, if you're the kind of director who refuses to communicate with your actors, choosing instead to simply do takes over and over again, you have to do these complex movements and setups dozens of times repeatedly. At the height of the studio era, when Wyler was at his own personal and professional height of power, he could do this across entire films. As his career waned and money became less ready (like on the late film The Collector), his visual language degraded with the rest of the industry, forcing him to rely more fully on closeups than at any other point in his career. What he did magnificently took time and money, and when he ran out of money, he ran out of time, and he had to film faster.

Actors

Wyler was probably one of the best actors' directors who offered no solid advice to his actors about what to do. As stated previously, he was known for dozens of takes, and he almost never communicated to his actors about why the first or the second or the thirtieth take was wrong in his mind. He'd just tell them to go again.

Charlton Heston, star of The Big Country and Ben-Hur, would later tell a story about Wyler's approach. It was a simple scene on Ben-Hur with Heston walking down a hall. On the eighth take, Heston finally asked Wyler what he was doing wrong. Wyler responded that he liked it on the first take when Heston kicked a pot on the ground. Heston hadn't done it since the first take because he thought Wyler had hated it, causing the call for a retake. Heston would phrase it roughly thus: Wyler didn't like actors, but he had great taste about what he wanted.

In terms of the Oscars, Wyler was one of the most successful directors when it came to his actors. Thirty-six performances under his direction received Oscar nominations, the most under any director still, and fourteen of them won the awards they were nominated for. He may not have wanted or been able to tell his actors what they were doing wrong, but he had a very good eye for when they were doing it right. Combine that with his ability to choose good ideas for movies, shepherd scripts well, and lens his films immaculately, and you've got a recipe for a long, fruitful career.

Lost to Time

I have a burgeoning theory that directors who remain in the public consciousness tend to carry their influences from German Expressionism on their sleeves. The talented chameleons, like Wyler, tend to get forgotten even while some of their films live on beyond them. Ben-Hur will never be forgotten, but the man who made it has become a secondary thought in that discussion. Why? Well, because it doesn't have a whole lot to do with The Best Years of Our Lives or The Heiress or The Letter or Dead End. It doesn't have the striking shadow work that someone like Hitchcock would bring to everything whether it needed it or not. His visuals are striking, but in less showy, more subtle ways that seem effortless and perhaps even pointless to those not really paying attention to what's going on across the screen. William Wyler was a chameleon of a director who put the story first always, and for that, one of the most successful, respected, and praised filmmakers of his time becomes a secondary thought to the larger film fan world.

He's a bit like Lubitsch or Hawks in that way. His films may be recalled and beloved, but the man himself? The artist who made them happen? Why bother? It's not like he's got a real authorial stamp on his films, right?

Wrong. Wyler's stamp wasn't thematic or visually showy. His stamp was all about quality. His stamp was about well-crafted drama built on well-written characters first and foremost. His stamp was great movies.

Recommendations

I can't walk away without pointing out some films that many might have missed. So, let me lead the way to, perhaps, some new discoveries you might enjoy.

I have to start with The Good Fairy, the best Ernst Lubitsch film that Ernst Lubitsch never made. It's a delight of a comedy starring Margaret Sullavan and Herbert Marshall about an innocent young girl who plays the good fairy to a down and out lawyer, and it's all delightful and wonderful. I put it #3 on my list of all of Wyler's films.

Next, I can't go without talking about at least one of his Bette Davis films (with whom he had a torrid affair), so I'll highlight The Little Foxes, a bitter, cynical look at a trio of siblings, and one in-law, who all hate each other and spend two hours tearing each other apart with polite phrasing. It's Wyler's most visually sumptuous achievement filled with great performances. Just for the record, this was #2 on my list (#1 was the Olivia de Havilland starring The Heiress which is within the same realm, but I get the sense is better known).

Finally, I'll recommend How to Steal a Million, another film I feel was inspired by Lubitsch, but which was made much later. Starring Peter O'Toole and Audrey Hepburn, it's another delight of a comedy about the daughter of an art forger who hires a thief to steal a fake sculpture from a French museum because it will reveal her father's scandalous secret.

You've probably seen Ben-Hur, Roman Holiday (another Lubitsch inspired film, I'm sure of it), The Best Years of Our Lives, and Mrs. Miniver, but you could honestly choose a film at random and be entertained. I wouldn't go so far as to say that he never made a bad film (there are too many holes in his early career that I couldn't fill to say that with confidence) or that he never made a less than good one (I really wanted to say that, but then I watched Funny Girl and was pretty thoroughly bored), but, gosh darn it, everything else was at least good. It's what one might expect from one of the finest, most talented directors who ever lived.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

Meg 2: The Trench

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

How to Steal a Million (Rating 4/4) Full Review "So, I love this film. I have a couple of small nitpicks here and there, but I ultimately just get on board by the end and am thankful for the heisty ride that Wyler gave me." [Library]

Patton (Rating 4/4) Full Review "Patton is just great, classical filmmaking." [Personal Collection]

The Godfather (Rating 4/4) Full Review "The story is tragic. The craft is impeccable. The acting is perfect. This is a titan of American cinema for a reason." [Personal Collection]

The Godfather Part II (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It's a testament to Coppola's incredible talent as a cinematic craftsman that he gets so much of this film to work, but he made better this year in The Conversation." [Personal Collection]

The Cars that Ate Paris (Rating 2/4) Full Review "I look forward to Weir finding better material to help him find that promise always just over the horizon but never arriving." [Criterion Channel]

Picnic at Hanging Rock (Rating 4/4) Full Review "This is a triumph of a film from a young filmmaker who's finding his footing after only a couple of years and showing the world that the Australian New Wave was worth paying attention to." [Personal Collection]

Gallipoli (Rating 4/4) Full Review "If the world wasn't already taking notice of Weir and the new Australian cinema by this point (they were), this should have been the moment they realized there was real talent down under." [Personal Collection]

The Year of Living Dangerously (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "This is an admirable effort from Weir, taking more money and a grander scope and turning out something surprisingly focused and affecting. Maybe Hollywood will come knocking." [Library]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 8/26, and it will talk about the directing career of Peter Weir.