William Wyler (11 page)

Hellman was aware that she would have to revise her play for the movies—Breen's memo had been very specific, and she was prepared to abide by it. Breen's stipulation that Goldwyn's film must not reference the stage play in any way was accomplished by changing its title to
These Three
. Though believing that the film deserved a life of its own, Hellman worked to ensure that the thematic integrity of her play—the power of a lie—was retained. Later, she rejected the notion that Hollywood was a “dead end for serious writers,” declaring, “i wouldn't have written movies if I thought that.”
¹³

Hellman's drafts went through a variety of permutations. The earliest prose treatment in the Goldwyn files is undated but was probably done in early August 1935. In it, Hellman creates an entirely new backstory for Karen and Martha to open the film, apparently having decided that, unlike the play (which opens with Mrs. Mortar teaching in the school), the film should focus immediately on the two friends. This early version of the story begins in England, where Karen's family, the Wrights, are landed gentry and Martha Dobie is a distant cousin. When Martha's father dies unexpectedly, leaving her only £100, she is taken in by the Wrights, who raise the two girls like sisters. World War I intervenes, and Karen's father dies, “a wreck from the war”; her mother dies shortly thereafter from grief. Mrs. Mortar—the black sheep of the family because she is an actress—becomes their chaperone. Karen and Martha conclude that they are best equipped to start a school and decide to do so in America, where they feel their English ancestry will convey a certain prestige. Once in America, Karen meets Dr. Joseph Cardin at a garden party; they fall in love and decide to marry. The school, however, is not doing very well, so Joe recommends that they visit Mrs. Tilford, who decides to send her granddaughter Mary to the school and then persuades others to send their children as well. One evening, Joe is called to the school to attend to a student suffering from pneumonia; he spends the night with the dying girl, who is being treated in Martha's room. While Karen lingers in the room with the dead girl, Mary sees Joe put his arm around Martha's shoulder as they emerge from the room. Mary fakes a heart attack and returns to her grandmother's house, where she accuses Karen and Martha of killing students and charges that Joe is having an affair with Martha. From there, the treatment follows the plot of Hellman's play until the end, at which point Martha patches things up with Karen and Joe and returns to England.

Why Hellman wanted to embellish the story in this way is not clear. None of the other treatments or drafts utilizes these details, including the two women's English beginnings. Perhaps, in an attempt to placate Breen, Hellman was trying to truly distance the film from the play. However, she obviously decided that this treatment pushed the story too far into the past, because the next treatment, dated August 21, 1935, opens in Karen and Martha's college dormitory room, where graduation gowns are being delivered amidst great excitement about the day ahead. It is established that Karen has inherited an old farmhouse, and the two young women decide to start a school there. When Karen and Martha arrive at the house, they meet Joe Cardin, who is tearing shingles off the roof to get rid of the bees that have nested there. This homely introduction of Joe was retained for the film, but other details were dropped in a treatment dated five days later, including that Joe and Karen had been childhood friends, that Joe is related to Mrs. Tilford, and Joe's proposal to Karen in the garden of Mrs. Tilford's estate (in the finished film, it occurs at a town fair). The treatment ends with Mrs. Tilford telling Martha and Karen that she has made a public apology for defaming their character and handing them a check as a gesture of restitution. The script ends with Martha on a ship alone and Joe and Karen getting back together.

In the August 26 treatment, as in the earlier draft, Mary's lie is unmasked when Rosalie's mother finds the bracelet her daughter had stolen from a classmate—Mary had been using this theft to force Rosalie to corroborate her lie about Martha and Karen. Martha decides that she must bring Karen and Joe back together, but she knows she cannot stay with them. Joe and Karen decide to pick up the pieces together, but somewhere else—”any place in the world.”
¹⁴

Hellman and Wyler became close friends during this period, and their friendship lasted throughout their lives. Describing Wyler as “the greatest American director,” Hellman carefully detailed her praise: “He had a wonderful pictorial sense—he knew how to pack so much into a shot that I felt I could leave certain things unsaid, knowing Willy would show them. We had to become friends, because we were the only two people in the Goldwyn asylum who weren't completely loony.”
¹⁵
She also commented, “Willy left you alone. He said things like, ‘Don't bother about the shots. Just do the dialogue. Don't tell me where to put the camera.' And I thought, this is heaven.”
¹⁶

By the time Wyler was hired to direct the film, Goldwyn had already cast the three main characters: Miriam Hopkins (Martha), Merle Oberon (Karen), and Joel McCrea (Joe). Wyler chose Bonita Granville to play Mary, and she remembered the experience fondly: “[Wyler] had infinite patience and never once raised his voice. Without putting it into specific terms, I realize now that each day he was teaching me something important—the technique of how to move, how to build to a climax, how important it is to listen to a scene—but most of all he taught me that integrity was absolutely vital to acting.”
¹⁷

Wyler was not thrilled with the rest of the cast, however. He would have preferred Leslie Howard for the role of Joe, and McCrea was not pleased that Wyler put him through so many takes. Oberon resented Wyler's attention to Granville and complained to McCrea that the child actress was stealing the picture. Hopkins had a reputation for being a difficult actress with a bad temper.

These problems with the actors were more than offset by Wyler's introduction to cinematographer Gregg Toland, who would become one of his most important collaborators—they worked together on all of Wyler's films with Goldwyn except
Dodsworth
. Toland was just as meticulous as Wyler, and as a result, their relationship got off to a rocky start. Wyler recalled, “i was in the habit of saying, ‘Put the camera here with a forty-millimeter lens, move it this way, pan over here, do this.' Well, he was not used to that…. I considered it part of my job. You don't do that with a man like Gregg Toland.”
¹⁸

In Toland, Wyler recognized a kindred spirit. They both valued a style that emphasized depth-of-focus photography, which enabled realism and fluidity in the storytelling. For a special section devoted to Toland in
Sequence
, Wyler commented on this style: “Because of it, I have been able to stage scenes in depth, keeping two or more people on the screen at the same time during extended dialogue scenes, and eliminating the need for cutting back and forth from one to the other. This makes for greater flow and continuity, intensifies dramatic situations, holds the audience's attention more compellingly and, of course, in addition makes for more exciting composition by adding the illusion of the third dimension, depth, to the two-dimensional screen.” He elaborated: “Most photography in Hollywood is ‘soft' and diffused, using less light and a larger lens opening. This photography is a handmaiden of the star system, and is designed to make the stars as young, beautiful and glamorous as possible. Toland's style, on the other hand, was an attempt to achieve
reality or truthfulness
on film.”
¹⁹

This is the philosophy André Bazin drew on when formulating his theories of cinematic realism and his assessment of the contributions of Orson Welles and William Wyler. These directors, according to Bazin, followed a tradition established by precursors such as Robert Flaherty and Erich Von Stroheim, who were more interested in “revealing” reality than adding to it. Depth of focus became one of the high points in the evolution of film because it brought the spectator “into a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoys with reality.” it also required a “more active mental attitude on the part of the spectator and a more positive contribution on his part to the action in progress.”
²⁰

Wyler also noted that he and Toland discussed each film “from beginning to end.” Like the direction, the style of the photography varied, depending on the subject. “in
These Three
,” Wyler explained, “we were dealing with little girl things. What was good was rather simple, attractive photography.”
²¹

As Hellman and Wyler worked on the project and filming progressed, the nation's economy was beginning to turn around; business was expanding, and New Deal programs were working. Radical politics—the exploration of alternatives to a failed capitalist system—was still popular, however, with artists and intellectuals. As part of a group of New York intellectuals working in Hollywood, Hellman was friendly with other writers such as Dorothy Parker, Donald Ogden Stewart, and Ring Lardner Jr., who were politically active and were becoming increasing vocal about the rise of fascist governments in Europe. Around this time, Benito Mussolini annexed Abyssinia, forcing Emperor Haile Selassie to flee, and then formed an alliance with Germany; Adolf Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland and forged alliances with Russia and Japan; and General Francisco Franco initiated a civil war against the elected Popular Front government in Spain. Structuring
The Children's Hour
(her first play) according to the conventions of melodrama, which presented society as a battleground between good and evil, Hellman trusted that audiences in 1934 would have no difficulty seeing a connection between Mary Tilford and her grandmother and the rise of totalitarian governments in Germany, Spain, and italy. In this play, as well as in subsequent works, Hellman locates her plots in realistic settings and populates them with bold, stark, and compelling characters whose schemes and struggles imply that the war between good and evil is the central dilemma of the times.

In Hollywood, Hellman and her fellow screenwriters were also up in arms over MGM's shelving of Sinclair Lewis's
It Can't Happen Here
, the story of the rise of a dictator in the United States. The studio had bought the rights to the novel when it was still in typescript and hired Sidney Howard, who had adapted
Arrowsmith
for Goldwyn in 1931 and would go on to adapt
Dodsworth
for Goldwyn and Wyler in 1936, to prepare a script. The first news releases announced that Will Hays, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America, had stopped the film, fearing international problems and the wrath of the Republican Party, but the Hays office denied banning the film. MGM announced that the project had been shelved because it was too expensive, and Goldwyn maintained that the film was canceled because of casting difficulties. Howard claimed to have seen a lengthy memo from Joseph Breen noting “dangerous material” in the script and suggesting drastic revisions. In any case, the film's cancellation was heartily approved by both Germany and italy; the German Film Chamber called Lewis “a full blooded Communist.” Lewis's biographer, Mark Schorer, concludes that the studio's motive for shelving the film was probably “less political than economic. Not only would this film have been banned in Germany and italy and other foreign markets, but probably all Metro films would henceforth have been kept out of Germany and italy.”
²²

It was in this volatile atmosphere that Wyler embarked on his first film with Goldwyn, based on Hellman's controversial play. Wyler, of course, was an interested observer of the situation in Europe, having arrived in the United States just fifteen years earlier. He had established his liberal credentials while filming
Counsellor-at-Law
, and even the light comedy
The Gay Deception
offered both a gently satiric portrayal of the wealthy and a warm, affectionate look at the working class. The latter, typical of the decade's screwball comedies, concludes with the marriage of a prince from a fictitious country and a secretary who dared to dream of spending as much as $19 for a hat. Wyler's friendship with Hellman, however, now sharpened and focused his political views and also made him more confident when he insisted on the artistic integrity of his projects and stood up for his own creative ideas.

The changes Hellman and Wyler made in transferring her play to the screen are substantive; in many ways, they constitute an improvement over the original. While the script was being prepared, a number of titles were suggested or briefly adopted, including “The Lie.” in a memo to Goldwyn, though, Merritt Hulburd indicated that he preferred “A Lie is Told” and also suggested “Word of Honor.”

Hellman's script begins with the delivery of graduation gowns around campus. There are shots of the Glee Club singing and girls calling out to the delivery boy from their windows, complaining that he is late. There is a cut to Karen and Martha's rooms, where we see Martha packing her trunk and Karen tutoring a student. From this cozy dorm scene, the camera moves to the college president delivering a speech to the graduates; then to Martha's aunt, Lily Mortar, telling another parent about the sacrifices she has made for her niece; and finally to Karen and Martha lounging on the campus green and talking about their future.

Feeling that this section was still too long, Wyler cut it considerably to make the completed film's opening move along quickly. Shots of the graduates standing in two uniform rows with the precision of a military drill immediately evoke a sense of the societal conformity that will be rocked by the ensuing scandal. That image—echoed later in a shot of the jury as the judge renders the verdict in the libel trial—captures the mind-set of fascist societies and deftly implies that America itself might share it. The opening shot is held long enough to accommodate the last words of the president's speech, at which point Wyler cuts to Karen and Martha, separating them from the crowd. They are seen as a unit, isolated from the rest of their classmates, until Martha's Aunt Lily (Catherine Doucet) intrudes. Karen wants to distance herself from Lily, but Martha holds on to her, and they deal with Lily together. In these scenes, the director visually establishes the bond between the two women and the entrance of a third party who causes a disturbance, foreshadowing the fate that awaits them. Although here Lily seems to be a harmless, self-centered actress, she is later revealed to have a cruel and sadistic streak when it comes to her niece, and she will play a significant role in Martha's undoing.