William Wyler (21 page)

Dead End
reflects the sense of cautious optimism generated by the prospect of Roosevelt's second term, which was soon tempered by the bombing of Guernica, the escalating political turmoil in Europe, and another economic downturn at home a few months after the president's second inauguration. In the month the film was released—August 1937—Japan attacked Shanghai, starting a war with China. The ambivalent mood of Wyler's film was also being reflected in
Lost Horizon
, a film that celebrates a society devoid of conflict—the alternative proposed by James Hilton's novel for a world on the verge of chaos.
Lost Horizon
begins in revolutionary China, a society engulfed by the struggles of the poor, as depicted in Irving Thalberg's
The Good Earth
, released the same year.
Dead End
eclipsed both films at the box office, garnering excellent reviews and critical praise for Wyler. It received four Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture, but Wyler was not nominated, and the film did not win any awards.

Jezebel
(1938)

In the summer of 1937, Hal Wallis, production head at Warner Brothers, decided that he wanted Wyler to direct
Jezebel
, an antebellum story set in New Orleans. The film would capitalize on the craze generated by David O. Selznick's national search for an actress to play Scarlett O'Hara in
Gone with the Wind
.

Jezebel
was Bette Davis's consolation prize for missing out on the plum role of Scarlett. Jack Warner had held the first option on Margaret Mitchell's best seller, but he passed on it because of his legal battles with Davis. She had left the studio in a dispute over the inferior roles she had been given after winning her first Oscar for
Dangerous
in 1935. After sailing for England to avoid being served with legal papers by Warner's lawyers, Davis signed with an Anglo-Italian producer to make films in Europe. Warner Brothers then served her with an injunction prohibiting her from offering her services anywhere, and the two sides prepared for a court battle. Jack Warner came to London with William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers depicted Davis as an ungrateful, spoiled child. Eventually, Warner won a three-year injunction, and Davis was forced to return to the studio. In an effort to placate his star, Jack Warner relieved Davis of the obligation to pay the studio's share of the court costs and gave her a series of prestige pictures, culminating in
Jezebel
.

Originally a Broadway play that was both a critical and a commercial failure,
Jezebel
closed early in 1934 after only thirty-two performances. But Wyler, who had seen the show when he still worked for Universal, recommended it as a potential film project: “I believe that
Jezebel
contains an excellent foundation for a picture. It's a very dramatic love story…. The weaknesses of the play can be overcome in a picture through the addition of many incidents and sequences only suggested and talked about. A good deal of action can be added. The atmosphere and costumes lend themselves to beauty in production.”
¹

By then, Wyler was developing both a taste for projects about the American social scene and an understanding of how stage properties could be translated effectively to the screen. He had already sublimated his own conflicts about America's lure for the immigrant in his work on
Counsellor-at-Law
for Universal.
Jezebel
, with its melodramatic explorations of racism and the potential effects of industrialism on the American landscape in the second half of the nineteenth century, naturally piqued Wyler's interest, and he could clearly envision how to strengthen the underdeveloped play.

On stage, the role of headstrong, spoiled socialite Julie Kendrick was played by Miriam Hopkins, who had taken over the part when Tallulah Bankhead became ill during rehearsals. Despite the play's failure and the protagonist's unsympathetic nature, Bette Davis thought this property would be an ideal vehicle for her, and she spent more than a year trying to persuade Jack Warner to buy the rights.

Walter MacEwen, Hal Wallis's executive assistant, read the play for Warner Brothers and expressed his reservations in a 1935 memo. Reiterating the critics' verdict—that the play was “not very good”—he went on to say, “The trouble is that there really is no one in the play to pull for, to offset the bitchiness of the leading part.” MacEwen added, “While Bette Davis receives acclaim for tasty supporting roles, I doubt if a picture built solely around her in an unsympathetic part would be so well liked.” Like Wyler, however, he felt that the play could be improved by giving the character of Julie a “slant” that would make her more “acceptable to audiences.” MacEwen suggested that Julie could start out as “a spoiled little vixen,” which could be justified by her upbringing, and then undergo “regeneration through suffering,” which would make her “a wiser and more palatable person after the final shot.”
²
This suggestion would be incorporated into subsequent revisions of the screenplay.

Warner bought the rights two years later, although Edmund Goulding (Wallis's original choice as director) echoed MacEwen's concerns. In a lengthy memo to Wallis, he commented that although Davis would likely distinguish herself in the role, audiences would have a difficult time identifying with the character. The studio, however, was determined to cash in on the
Gone with the Wind
craze and went ahead with the film.

Jezebel
was filmed during one of the delays in the making of
Gone with the Wind
, and the Warners took pleasure in their opportunistic gambit. Selznick, however, tried to bully Jack Warner into thinking that
Jezebel
would be “damned as an imitation by the millions of readers, and lovers, of
Gone with the Wind.”
He specifically mentioned the dinner scene in
Jezebel
, where the men discuss the differences between the North and the South and the imminent war, leading to Preston's declaration that the North will win because of its superior machinery. When Selznick charged that the scene “is lifted practically bodily out of
Gone with the Wind
,” Warner responded nonchalantly, pointing out that the dinner scene was taken directly from Owen Davis's play. He sent Selznick a copy of the scene and thanked him for his “splendid interest.”
³

Jezebel
would be Davis's first film with an important director. The production budget was around $800,000, but the film ended up costing more than $1 million because Wyler went twenty-eight days over the forty-eight allotted for filming. Warner had borrowed Wyler from Goldwyn, stipulating that he would be paid $75,000 for twelve weeks beginning on or about September 6, 1937; if his services were required beyond that time, he would be paid $1,041.66 per day.
⁴

As noted earlier, Wallis originally considered hiring Edmund Goulding, who was considered an important director at Warner Brothers, to direct the film, and Goulding wrote a preliminary report on the project. But Lou Edelman, a production supervisor and producer at Warner, felt that Goulding was not up to the job. In a memo, Edelman complained that Goulding did not grasp the shadings of Julie's character, and he called the director's ideas about the film old-fashioned and conventional. Edelman wrote that
Jezebel
was trying “to tell the story of a bitch,” whereas Goulding's story was “not about a Jezebel but about any violent woman.”
⁵
Wallis obviously agreed, and he decided to borrow Wyler from Samuel Goldwyn. Goulding was assigned to direct
The Dawn Patrol
with Errol Flynn instead, and a year later he would direct Bette Davis in one of her greatest triumphs,
Dark Victory
.

Wyler came to the studio with a reputation for being exacting and difficult—obsessive about details and fond of ordering multiple takes for scenes. His autocratic behavior had already incurred the wrath of Ruth Chatterton, Miriam Hopkins, and Sylvia Sidney. Humphrey Bogart, who had just finished shooting
Dead End
with Wyler, joked with Davis that she wouldn't last two weeks.

At first, Davis was put off when she heard that Wyler would be directing. She had never forgotten an unpleasant encounter with him in 1930 when she had tested for
A House Divided
. The wardrobe department had dressed her in a low-cut dress that showed too much cleavage, and Wyler is reputed to have “whispered” loud enough for Davis to hear, “What do you think about these dames who show their tits and think they can get a job.”
⁶
Davis was humiliated. But now that she was in a position of power, she looked forward to exacting her revenge. Davis later recalled: “In a state of elation I went to his office at Warner Brothers for my first interview with him…. I sat down and immediately told him that he had tested me at Universal many years ago. He did not remember. I told him what he had said…. There was a long pause, and Mr. Wyler said, ‘I am a much nicer person now!' They say revenge is sweet. I found it to be futile that day.”
⁷

In Wyler, Davis would discover her ideal director. Like her, he was a perfectionist who knew exactly what he wanted. Wyler's other leading ladies often found him to be temperamental, rude, and even abusive, and he would retake a scene as many as forty times. Unlike some of her predecessors, however, Davis reveled in the Wyler “touch.” In her autobiography she wrote, “I became such a champion of his talent—and still am—that one would have thought I was his highly paid press agent. It was he who helped me realize my full potential as an actress. I met my match in this exceptionally creative and talented director.”
⁸
Davis would give three of her finest performances under Wyler's direction; she won her second Academy Award for
Jezebel
and then went on to star in
The Letter
(1940) and
The Little Foxes
(1941).

In a note to his play, which was written as a vehicle for Tallulah Bankhead, Owen Davis states that he “wants to combine the technique of modern playwriting with the glamour of the old theater.”
⁹
But there is very little of the modern in
Jezebel
. Davis lifts Eugene O'Neill's device of using two giant live oaks to dominate the stage and represent the color and romance of the Deep South. This stale, simplistic symbolism is typical of the play as a whole, which presents a series of two-dimensional characters struggling through a story of sin and redemption.

The play's Julie is surnamed Kendrick, as is Preston (known as Pres), her fiancé and cousin. (Her name is changed to Marsden in the film, his to Dillard.) Early in the play, she exclaims, “We Kendricks have always married with our own kin…so what's bad in us just naturally keeps on getting worse.”
¹⁰
The reason for the couple's breakup is not convincingly presented, as Julie merely reports that she wore a red dress instead of the white one Pres preferred. Hurt by his rejection, she vows never to wear white again and ends their engagement. The scene in which Julie decides to repent and then meets Pres's new wife also lacks drama, emotion, or tension. Davis tries on occasion to inject some social commentary into the play, but these attempts come off like afterthoughts and do not contribute to its texture.

Wyler knew he would need a strong screenplay to realize his concept of the film. Early in 1937, Wallis commissioned a script from Robert Buckner, who delivered a first draft on April 30. Although Buckner's script makes some substantial changes, it does not overcome the weaknesses of the original. In his introductory note, Buckner writes that New Orleans should be the factor that makes this story “less static, less familiar.” As “the most truly southern [city] in spirit and history,” he feels that New Orleans has been neglected as a film locale. Buckner invents a scene in which Julie goes to a cockfight while looking for one her servants. Pres objects to her going, follows her there, and notes the “true wildness of her character, the ungoverned element of latent cruelty and sadistic passion” as she watches the cockfight. When he reproves her, she slaps him across the face, which leads to their breakup and to Julie's subsequent trip to Paris and New York, the highlights of which are depicted in the script, including a scene in which she kisses a French officer at a dance. When Julie returns to New Orleans, ready to reclaim Pres, she learns that he has married. That scene, like the one in the play, has no real dramatic effect—Amy, Pres's wife, is not even present. Later, professing that he still loves her, Pres takes Julie in his arms and kisses her. This scene is witnessed by Buck Cantrell and Amy. When Pres apologizes to Amy, Julie slaps him again, and Buck challenges Pres to a duel. Julie is remorseful about her part in this episode and tries to stop the duel. She confesses her love to Pres, who admits that he still loves her, too. He tells Julie that Amy knows the truth, “that between you and I there is something too strong for any of us to forget—something she could never share—it's there—it always has been, and it always will be.” They declare their enduring love for each other as the film ends.
¹¹

Buckner's screenplay was deemed unsatisfactory, so the studio hired Clements Ripley to fashion a script. Ripley's treatment, submitted on July 14, was not much better. The Olympus Ball sequence, the finished film's centerpiece, is not included. In a scene similar to Buckner's version, Julie goes out on the town with Buck Cantrell, who gets into a fight and kills someone. When Julie returns home, Pres is waiting for her and insists that they go to the ball. She refuses, they fight, and Julie slaps Pres. He leaves, and Julie goes to Paris and New York. In Ripley's version, when Julie learns of Pres's engagement to Amy, she attempts, unsuccessfully, to seduce Pres, then abruptly announces her engagement to Buck. The film concludes with a duel between Pres and Buck; Pres shoots in the air and is mortally wounded by Buck's return shot. When Amy (who has since married Pres), goes to see her dying husband, she realizes that he still loves Julie. The script ends with Julie going to Pres as Amy leaves, refusing to stay with a man who loves another woman.

Warner then assigned the project to Abem Finkel, who had recently written the Ku Klux Klan exposé
Black Legion
and
Marked Woman
for Bette Davis. He added many of the scenes found in the completed version of
Jezebel
, including Davis's striking entrance in her riding habit. The revised treatment, coauthored by Finkel and Ripley, is dated September 4. A month later, at Wyler's request, Wallis approved the addition of John Huston to the writing team to work on the last half of the script. In a memo to Henry Blanke, the associate producer, dated October 28, 1937, Wallis wrote, Wyler “maintains that Huston knows exactly his feelings and thoughts about the script, and his views on the last half of it. He explains that he himself cannot devote the time to consult with the writers, and that Huston will be a sort of go-between operating between the writers, and you, and himself.”
¹²
Huston was hired after filming had already started, and his contribution consisted of punching up some of the dialogue, especially in the two dinner scenes; strengthening the character of Julie; and improving what Wyler thought were implausible sections at the end of the script.