William Wyler (28 page)

When Cole finally guns down this defender of the old order at the end of the film, it is because Bean has broken his word to him. Following Cole's presentation of the homesteaders' case, Bean is less interested in that argument than in securing the lock of Lillie's hair that Cole claims to possess. Cole offers to give it to him if Bean and his men will remove all the stray cattle from the homesteaders' land, and Bean agrees to do so. Cole, however, has to come up with a lock of hair, so he tricks Jane-Ellen into letting him cut off a lock of hers. Bean rounds up the cattle and gets what he thinks is Lillie's hair in return.

The homesteaders celebrate their harvest with festivities, including a dance, where an American flag is seen in the corner. Here, Wyler offers some of his most evocative images of nature and the transformation of the wilderness. He shows the settlers kneeling before the cornfields and being led in prayer by Caliphet Mathews (Jane-Ellen's father), whose voice is heard as Wyler cuts to various views of the fields and the land bathed in the beauty of Toland's black-and-white–streaked Sky. Mathews intones, “The land that was desolate has become like a garden.”

Wyler cuts away to Cole and Jane-Ellen. She is showing him what she considers the most beautiful parcel of the land in the area—a perfect place for a home. Cole seems more receptive to the notion of a home than he was earlier, even telling Jane-Ellen how to build one. As they kiss, however, Wyler cuts to a fire in the distance. The homesteaders' dream is being destroyed; Mathews will soon be killed and his home destroyed. Wyler's quick cuts showing the devastation of the land are as effective as the earlier pastoral views. Shocked and hurt, Cole confronts Bean and forces him to admit that he is responsible for the fire. Cole promises to stop him and goes to Fort Davis to have himself deputized. In the meantime, Bean has changed the name of Vinegarroon to Langtry—a place for cattlemen. His announcement is greeted by gunfire, not prayer.

The final showdown, as noted earlier, takes place in the theater where Lillie is set to perform. Bean has bought all the tickets, and he is the only one in the audience. Before the curtain rises, Wyler's camera cranes up, isolating Bean in the theater. The illusory world he is anticipating is then shattered when he sees Cole onstage instead of Lillie. A gun battle ensues, and Bean is wounded. In a last gesture of friendship, Cole helps him backstage to meet Lillie, who appears like a vision to him in a tiara and a white dress. All he can say is, “I'm pleased to meet ya,” as the vision fades and he dies.

In the background of this affecting scene is heard “Do You Remember Sweet Betsy from Pike”—a traditional mid-nineteenth-century song by an unknown composer detailing the travails of a man and his sweetheart. Betsy and Ike cross the country and the desert, suffering multiple hardships. Finally reaching their destination, they attend a dance, where Ike asks Betsy, “You're an angel, but where are your wings?” They marry, but Ike soon becomes jealous and wants a divorce, and Betsy is happy to see him leave. The song celebrates a love that endures many hardships but ultimately fails. Bean, in contrast, is allowed to die happy, holding on to his illusion of Lillie, but his town for cattlemen will be trampled by historical necessity. The film's closing scene shows Cole and Jane-Ellen in their home, presumably married, as they watch a wagonload of settlers returning to the land. A map of Texas is displayed prominently on their wall, and the final image is a field of wheat in full bloom.

The Westerner
is an unbalanced film whose numerous script revisions never arrived at a clear conception of the Cole Hardin character. Over the course of multiple revisions, his past was eliminated and few character lines were filled in. Cooper was right to object to playing such a slight character, although he managed to give a fine, strong performance. Bean, in contrast, is a superbly realized character, and Brennan played him to the hilt. Although the judge is in most respects a despicable character, Brennan made him likable. Even when he deceives Cole and burns out the homesteaders, the actor brings such poignancy to Bean's dying moments—the way he tucks his hand into his uniform, the bravery he wants to show Lillie, the look of adoration in his eyes—that the audience sympathizes with him at the end. (Contrast this performance with his Pa Clanton in
My Darling Clementine
, a wholly evil man who elicits no sympathy.) The imbalance in the relationship between the two male leads is matched by the film's failure to realize the character of Jane-Ellen, which is not helped by Doris Davenport's overly aggressive performance, or to persuasively present the homesteaders' viewpoint.

In consequence, the film really belongs to Judge Roy Bean, and this muddles it thematically. Wyler softens this man's murderous, antisocial side by focusing on his affection for Cole and his outsized obsession with Lillie. But Bean's desire for power is pathological, and his desire for Lillie should be more effectively implicated in his madness; that his obsession is presented comically and even indulgently undercuts the film's social message, which should be carried by Cole and Jane-Ellen. The heroine's struggles against what Bean represents and her determination to save and work her land are meant to symbolize the triumph of civilization and American progress, but both her marriage to Cole and the western movement of the wagons offer no more than lip service to these ideals. The film makes a stronger case for Cole's love for Bean.

Wyler's direction is also patchy. Despite the fact that he cut his teeth on westerns, he seems more comfortable indoors than out. The scenes inside Bean's courthouse are effectively staged and handled, but many of the outdoor sequences—especially the fights and the scenes of the homesteaders riding toward Vinegarroon with Cole in pursuit—look clumsy, and the editing is awkward. Wyler commented that he was attracted to the interplay between Bean and Cole, and frankly, he seems to have been bored by other aspects of the story.

Nonetheless, the film was given a spectacular send-off. The premiere in Fort Worth was tied to a charity show hosted by Bob Hope. A rodeo-style parade through town was attended by Wyler and his wife Talli, Gary Cooper, and other Hollywood celebrities. More than 300,000 people lined the streets to watch the festivities. The film earned Stuart Lake an Oscar nomination for his original story, and Walter Brennan won as Best Supporting Actor, even though his was the starring performance.

The Westerner
was bookended by Wyler's two most stylized films,
Wuthering Heights
and
The Letter
. The latter was also released in 1940 and, like
Jezebel
, was made for Warner Brothers.
The Letter
also reunited Wyler with Better Davis, who gave another outstanding performance and earned her second Oscar nomination under Wyler's guidance. It was Wyler's fifth film in five years to earn a Best Picture nomination, and it was the third time in five years that he was nominated as Best Director.

The Letter
, like most of Wyler's recent efforts, was adapted from a play. This one, by W. Somerset Maugham, had opened in London in 1927 starring Gladys Cooper and on Broadway in 1929 with Katharine Cornell. (Also in 1929, Paramount released a film version starring Jeanne Eagels, with Reginald Owen and Herbert Marshall.) The play is about Leslie Crosbie, the wife of an English plantation manager in Malaysia who murders her secret lover out of anger and jealousy and then uses her social position to hide the truth and claim self-defense. In filming this dark tale, Wyler again examines the themes of unfulfilled passion, social hypocrisy and compromise, and sexual tension.
The Letter
covers much the same ground as
Wuthering Heights
, but with more sophisticated and polished pictorial flourishes. Wyler sidesteps Maugham's broad psychological portraits, substituting atmospheric and exotic visual compositions.

The film's central image, which recurs at various key moments in the film, is a full moon. It first appears at the beginning, when Leslie shoots six bullets into her lover. Screenwriter Howard Koch told Jan Herman that Wyler felt something was missing from the script: “An image. Something to unify the story that isn't there now.” Koch suggested using the moon, which was already part of the opening, to represent “the woman's suppressed guilt behind the façade of her protested innocence.”
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The image undoubtedly meant even more than that to Wyler, which is why Koch's suggestion seized his imagination.

Leslie Crosbie, like Catherine Earnshaw and other Wyler protagonists, is stifled by a society that cannot contain her passions. She feels trapped in her marriage to a sweet but dull businessman (an Edgar Linton–like character) who loves her but can never satisfy the deeper yearnings and unfulfilled aspirations the moon represents. Romantic poets often employed the moon as a symbol of poetic reverie and heightened imaginative consciousness. William Wordsworth's “A Night Piece,” for instance, offers a poetic example of the moon providing a glimpse of the infinite:

 

He looks up—the clouds are split

Asunder—and above his head he sees

The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens.

There in the black-blue vault she sails along,

Followed by multitudes of stars.

Wyler and cameraman Tony Gaudio strive to capture this image in their portraits of the moon, featuring every detail the poet describes (except the stars). The photography is so evocative that one can even see the blue.

Wyler extends the symbolic qualities of this image even further. Using lowered blinds on the windows, Wyler casts the moonlight on Leslie as though, in Koch's words, he is “printing prison stripes on her dress”
⁴¹
—suggesting both her imprisonment within herself and her guilt over the murder. Mimicking techniques from German Expressionism, Wyler's dramatic application of this shadowed effect from the blinds anticipates their use in film noir, where they became a stylistic hallmark. Also, although the film feels as if it takes place almost entirely at night, Wyler carefully alternates light and dark spaces to illuminate the dual aspects of his heroine's personality. Charles Affron notes, “The audience of
The Letter
is caught in a visual inquiry, its characters in a moral and legal one. The clash between the image's clarity and the situation's ambiguity is rendered by Davis and Wyler.”
⁴²

Wyler also effectively uses Leslie's lace-making as a device to embody her frustration at having to restrain her sexual desires and passions to maintain her social position as the wife of a planter. (Both Catherine Earnshaw and Catherine Sloper are shown embroidering in the same way, and for the same reasons.) The film's final image is of Leslie's lace fluttering in the breeze in her room as the moonlight streams through the slats, illuminating the floor beside it. The eerie effect of this image is anticipated in a scene in which Leslie meets her murdered lover's Eurasian widow (Gale Sondergaard) in a darkly lit establishment in the Chinese section of the city. Wyler emphasizes its Byzantine alleyways and air of mystery, and Leslie attempts to disguise herself by wearing a lace head covering, which the widow asks her to remove. In one of the scenes in that sequence, Leslie's head, covered by the lace shawl, is shown in three-quarter profile against a latticed, lighted window.

The opening tracking shot of the film is justifiably famous, as Wyler's camera slips past some sleeping natives, past the Crosbie house, and up the front porch. Suddenly, a shot is heard, a cockatoo in the foreground flies off, and a man stumbles out of the house onto the porch. A woman exits the house and shoots at him with a handgun. She then fires four more times as the camera tracks to her face, revealing a cold, hard expression that veers toward contempt. This sequence, opening with a shot of the moon and without any dialogue, fully captures the world of Maugham's play. Wyler's skill at manipulating space—this time, within what seems like a single shot (it is actually two)—effectively introduces the multiple worlds of the film and its various planes of meaning. (This sequence was Wyler's invention; it has no basis in the script, which begins with shots of Malay boys working the rubber trees and the sound of axes.)

Wyler would repeat the effect at the end of the film, whose closing scenes produced a certain amount of controversy between Bette Davis and the director. Leslie's final confrontation with her husband, Robert (Herbert Marshall, who had played the lover Hammond in the 1929 version), begins when he enters their bedroom. The shadows from the blinds cross him, prefiguring the end of their marriage, and Leslie confesses, “With all my heart, I still love the man I killed.” She is telling her husband that she can no longer endure their marriage and that murdering Hammond has not killed her desire for him. Davis said, “I couldn't conceive of any woman looking into her husband's eyes and admitting such a thing. I felt it would come out of her unbeknownst to herself, and therefore she would not be looking at him.”
⁴³
Wyler disagreed: “If she turns away from him, she just lessens the impact, and she's ashamed to admit it. But if she says it to him in a desperate moment of honesty and self-flagellation, then, it seemed to me, it hits him twice as hard and it's a terrible confession to make. You can't say that looking away.”
⁴⁴
Davis walked off the set but eventually relented: “I did it his way. It played validly, heaven knows, but to this day I think my way was the right way. I lost, but I lost to an artist.”
⁴⁵

After this confrontation, Leslie walks toward the back door, whose windows are covered by blinds. Opening the door, she faces a lush outdoor world filled with exotic plants—the contrast is startling. As Leslie walks through this garden area, preceded by her shadow, she sees the moon go behind the clouds, and the screen goes dark. She continues until she comes face-to-face with Mrs. Hammond, flanked by a male companion; he holds Leslie while the widow stabs her. As they attempt to walk away, they are stopped by two policemen. The moon comes out as Wyler's camera pans to Leslie's body and cranes up a wall into the Crosbie house, where, from a distance, party guests are seen dancing, framed in the doorway. The camera then pans to Leslie's room, settling on her lace and the final shot of the moon.