William Wyler (58 page)

One would be hard-pressed to name another mainstream American film that looks at racism so unsparingly. The word
nigger
is used often and offhandedly by both upper-class and working-class whites. The subhuman treatment of blacks by whites is an everyday occurrence, regarded casually and indifferently. Wyler's camera presents these actions objectively as well, and this steely objectivity heightens the power of the film. When the two police officers, Worth (Zerbe) and Bumpas (Arch Johnson), return from killing Jones, the desk officer, Mr. Ike (Chill Wills), asks where they've been. When Bumpas replies, “We killed us a nigger,” there is barely a reaction. Wyler films the scene in middle distance, as Ike asks about the identity of the victim and Bumpas stands behind him at the filing cabinet. They are soon joined by Worth, who is still visibly shaken by his partner's mutilation of Jones's corpse and asks for a drink. Wyler composes the shot by placing Worth on the left, Ike leaning on the desk on the right, and Bumpass standing behind them, so that they form a triangle—in Wyler's films, this configuration usually signifies that a community cannot be healed or put back together. (A similar pictorial structure is introduced earlier in Hedgepath's office, when Jones announces that despite Emma's determination to contest the divorce, he plans to go through with it. As the lawyer questions the wisdom of naming a white man in court, Jones replies, “To hell with the white man!” In that scene, Wyler places Steve, the new liberal law partner, at the top of the triangle, with Jones and Hedgepath on either side. Jones's bold defiance will cost him his life and accomplish nothing.)

Wyler also alternates between locales that are darkly and brightly lit. Virtually all the scenes in Mamma Lavorn's tavern, the primary place where black people congregate, are done with very little lighting. Throughout, the lives of the black characters are associated with darkness, a kind of life in death, like the leper caves in
Ben-Hur
. Jones is murdered at night; Erleen, a black woman whose husband is in jail, is raped by Willie Joe at night; and Mosby and Benny meet with Jones at night. L. B. Jones, of course, is in the death business himself, and in the two scenes in which he meets with clients to plan their funerals, both women seem to be looking forward to a grand interment, as if dying will grant them the importance they were denied in life. The darkness also emphasizes the violence and brutality of the black characters' lives. Their personal spaces—the bars and dingy homes—are filled with the tension of violence and mystery housed within them, the sense that something is brewing and will soon explode.

The streets of downtown Somerton, however, are invariably bathed in sunlight, as are Oman Hedgepath's office and estate. The gentleman lawyer, who is served by a good-natured black butler and likes to relax in his hammock with a drink at his side, looks like a character out of Wyler's
Jezebel
—indeed, his antebellum house looks like it was lifted off the set of that film. Nonetheless, the darkness that overshadows a good portion of the film threatens to envelop this elegant way of life and what it represents.

The film opens with a visual metaphor: the camera focuses on railroad tracks that eventually crisscross, as the plot strands involving the white and black characters eventually do. On the train heading for Somerton are Steve Mundine and his wife, Nella. Steve is looking forward to joining the law firm of his uncle, who has made him a partner. On the same train but in another car is Sonny Boy Mosby, whose luggage consists of a cigar box containing a gun, which he looks at as the train nears the station. Sonny Boy is coming home to seek revenge on a policeman, Stanley Bumpas, who beat him when he was a boy. The introductory shots of both men are through the train windows, suggesting that both are trapped, though for different reasons. Their initial views of Somerton out those windows distinguish the two characters' social standing—Steve sees an open, verdant country streetscape, while Sonny Boy looks out on a dilapidated, slum-like neighborhood. Although their two stories will intersect during the course of the film, Steve and Sonny Boy never meet. At the end of the film, both are seen on the same train headed out of town, but across the aisle from each other, their lives linked by the events of the story.

The plot is triggered by L. B. Jones's desire for a divorce from his wife, Emma. Jones, a wealthy undertaker, asks Hedgepath to represent him because he is “the best.” The lawyer refuses at first but then reluctantly takes the case to please his nephew, who has just arrived in town. Tensions escalate when Emma decides to contest the divorce, which means that her lover, Willie Joe Worth, a white policeman, will be named in open court. Hedgepath then visits Willie Joe at police headquarters and tells him to fix things with Emma. Wyler's framing is suggestive here: the back office at the station is cramped, so cluttered that Hedgepath has trouble closing the door. The scene is conveyed mostly in two-shots, as Wyler emphasizes the dark, constricted area but also keeps his camera focused on the window. The entire locus of the law is thus presented as compromised and corrupt, and Hedgepath, the town's leading citizen, is implicated as well.

Willie Joe first tries to ward off trouble by paying a visit to Emma. As he enters her room, Wyler frames him in the doorway, while at the extreme left, Emma is framed in a full-length mirror. The geometrical patterning of the door molding and the edge of the mirror seem to divide the frame into three sections, creating a triptych effect. The scene's action, presented primarily in two-shots, is one of the most violent in the Wyler canon. Willie Joe slaps Emma around and draws a gun on her, but she is not intimidated. Then she tells him that she is pregnant with his baby, and when she refuses to get an abortion, he beats her and leaves.

Willie Joe, frustrated by Emma's refusal to back down and consent to the divorce, visits Hedgepath at his home, where he is dining with Steve. The lawyer is again implicated by being at the head of another triangular shot that joins him with Steve and Willie Joe. The policeman next tries to intimidate Jones, who, like his wife, refuses to back down. But Jones is lured into the police car (like Erleen), where Willie Joe jumps into the backseat and starts to beat him. Jones jumps from the moving car and flees to a junkyard. Bumpas kills the blind junkyard owner's dog before Willie Joe finally shoots Jones in the back of the head. Bumpas then mutilates Jones's corpse and hangs him from a hook to make it look like a revenge killing. Wyler shoots the hanging body from above, picturing it among the useless motors and auto bodies, the detritus of the modern world—a telling commentary on how little we have progressed since the era of
Jezebel
. Wyler repeats this high-angle shot when shooting Emma and Benny from above, through the bars of the jail, where they have been imprisoned for Jones's death—more human debris.

Hedgepath is appalled to learn that his suggestion to “fix things” may have caused Jones's murder. But when Willie Joe confesses to the crime, Hedgepath nonetheless convinces him that concealing the murder would be best for the community. He then assures his nephew that the incident has been handled “quietly.”

Wyler concludes the film with Steve and Nella leaving Somerton. Disgusted by the compromises made by Hedgepath, they have decided that they cannot live in such a racist community. Meanwhile, Jones is being buried in a lavish funeral ceremony with a chorus of singers at his graveside. While the funeral is going on, Mosby visits Bumpas's farm and—in what is surely the grisliest scene in a Wyler film—pushes the policeman into a harvester. The final sequence shows the Mundines and Mosby on a train again, though now Mosby sits opposite Steve and Nella. Wyler's last shot is of Mosby, perhaps indicating that his fury will be the agent that precipitates change, though that interpretation may be a bit too forward-looking for what is, essentially, an angry and despairing film. The Mundines, who represent liberal ideology, are empty, ineffectual people—well-meaning but useless—and Jones's decision to stand up to his oppressors is a meaningless gesture as well. Killed at night with no witnesses, in a junkyard owned by a blind man, he finds his glory in the most expensive funeral his establishment can provide. The killer goes free; the status quo is preserved.

Stirling Silliphant's Oscar-winning
In the Heat of the Night
is a more nuanced film that ultimately celebrates the potential for reconciliation and respect between the races, as Gillespie (Rod Steiger) and Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) become allies and friends. In his
Pictures at a Revolution
, Mark Harris writes that early in the development of that film, director Norman Jewison decided to “strip away scenes in which Tibbs faced the systemic racism of a small southern town.”
³⁰
Emphasized instead, in the words of
Time
magazine, is the lesson “that men can join hands out of fear and hatred and shape from base emotions something identifiable as a kind of love.”
³¹
Wyler's film offers no such compromises. Having labeled
In the Heat of the Night
a “fantasy of racial discrimination,” Andrew Sarris, never a champion of Wyler, called
The Liberation of L. B. Jones
“the most provocative brief for Black Power ever to come out of a Hollywood studio.” He went on to say that “it may be the first American movie, black or white, to dramatize the matter-of-fact exploitation of black women by white supremacists.”
³²
It was certainly the first mainstream Hollywood film to condone the murder of a white police officer by a black man. Wyler's final film is perhaps his most revolutionary. It is surely among his most powerful.

The Liberation of L. B. Jones
was Wyler's first out-and-out financial failure. It was popular with African American audiences, but whites stayed away, in Samuel Goldwyn's immortal words, “in droves.” At the time, Wyler tried to downplay the controversial nature of the material, telling
Entertainment World
that the film was not about the South or black-white relations: “We made a film about one incident that took place and we translated what happened just like in the film
In Cold Blood
[released in 1967]. It was not about Kansas or farmers. It was about one incident that happened.”
³³
Three years later, however, he was more forthright, telling Madsen, “I wanted the audience to go out with a sense of guilt, of embarrassment at knowing what was going on and perhaps a feeling that they should do something about it.” He added that he was proud of his film and “highly prejudiced in its favor.”
³⁴

Wyler's next film was to be another stage adaptation—
Forty Carats
, a light comedy that had enjoyed a successful run on Broadway and earned Julie Harris a Tony. It would be a change of pace after
L. B. Jones
. With a good script in hand, he sent Robert Swink to Mexico to scout locations (for the opening scenes, which the play places in Greece). Wyler's health was in decline, however, and the sudden death of his brother Robert in 1971 made him rethink his priorities. He managed to get out of the remainder of his contract with Columbia, with the help of his childhood friend Paul Kohner, who stated: “I gave him lots of arguments but he insisted that he be freed of all commitments. He quit films right then and there.”
³⁵

On March 9, 1976, Wyler was honored as the fourth recipient of the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award. The affair, held at the Century Plaza Hotel in Beverly Hills, was attended by First Lady Betty Ford and numerous Hollywood luminaries, including Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Charlton Heston, Greer Garson, Fred Astaire, Barbra Streisand, Frank Capra, and George Cukor. Fonda called Wyler “the most versatile director to ever grace our industry”; Streisand described him as “an American institution.” George Stevens Jr., director of the American Film Institute, emphasized Wyler's singular “ability to conceal the brush-strokes—to put the poem on the pedestal, and not the poet.”

William Wyler died on July 27, 1981, ten years after his retirement. Shortly after his funeral at Forest Lawn Cemetery, a memorial service held at the old Directors' Guild of America building was attended by more than 500 people. Former guild president George Sydney said, “Willy's films will be enjoyed as long as man wants to see the best.” Bette Davis commented, “The entire town should be at half-mast. When the king dies, all the flags are at half-mast.” Her comment echoed that of his frequent collaborator Lillian Hellman, who called him “the greatest of all American directors.” Biographer Jan Herman noted that of all the eulogies accorded him, Wyler's wife, Talli, was fondest of the remarks made by Philip Dunne: “Talent doesn't care whom it happens to. Sometimes it happens to rather dreadful people. In Willy's case, it happened to the best of us.”
³⁶

Wyler was often associated with “the best”—garnering twelve Oscar nominations as Best Director and winning that award three times, as well as the French Victoire Award and three New York Film Critics Awards as Best Director. His actors were also named “best” by the Motion Picture Academy thirteen times. Few directors could match Wyler's range, his psychological subtlety, his ability to inspire and encourage actors, his poetic sensibility, or his humanism. Whether or not he was “the best,” Wyler most certainly belongs in the company of the most accomplished and distinguished of American directors.

First, I must thank the Rutgers Research Council, which awarded me several grants that allowed me to travel to Los Angeles to study William Wyler's papers. While in Los Angeles, I benefited from the generosity and expertise of the staff at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; in particular, very special thanks to Kristine Krueger; Barbara Hall, the head of Special Collections; and Jenny Romero. Another special thank you to Lauren Buisson and her staff at the Charles E. Young Research Library, Department of Special Collections at UCLA. I am also indebted to Harry Miller, senior reference archivist at the Wisconsin Historical Society, for his help with the Ruth and Augustus Goetz Papers.

I also extend my gratitude to Catherine Wyler and Pat McGilligan for their encouragement, many acts of kindness, and words of wisdom. A special thank you to Anne Dean Watkins for her enthusiasm and belief in this project.

My deepest appreciation goes out to Merve Fejzula, who translated three essays from the French and, like Wyler, knows how to pronounce
auteur
. She also located numerous essays and interviews and reformatted all the notes and the bibliography.

As always, my wife, Kathy, offered countless suggestions that made this book better. Over the years, Lizzie, Matt, Jessica, and Adam have made me better as well.