William Wyler

William Wyler (born July 1, 1902, Mülhausen, Germany [now Mulhouse, France]—died July 27, 1981, Beverly Hills, California, U.S.) was a German-born American director of motion pictures that combined a high degree of technical polish with a clear narrative style and sensitive handling of human relationships. Most of his feature films were so-called prestige pictures based on novels or plays. Wyler was a perfectionist whose relentless pursuit of realism and emotional complexity was sometimes excoriated by exhausted actors and budget-conscious studio executives. His painstaking methods on the set earned him the nickname “40-Take Wyler,” yet a plethora of actors won Academy Awards for their work with Wyler, who was himself the recipient of three Oscars and eight additional nominations for best director.

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Early life and work

Wyler, the son of a Swiss merchant father and an opera-loving German mother, grew up in the Alsace-Lorraine region, which passed back and forth between France and Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries. Although his youthful bad behaviour resulted in his expulsion from a number of schools, Wyler attended the École Supérieure de Commerce in Lausanne, Switzerland, and briefly studied violin at the Paris Conservatory. During a visit to Europe, his mother’s distant cousin Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal Pictures, invited Wyler to the United States to work for the studio. Wyler joined Universal’s New York City-based international publicity department in 1920, but by 1922 he had transferred to the Universal City lot in California, where he worked as an office boy, property boy, script clerk, and assistant casting director.

By 1924 he was an assistant director on two-reel westerns and, more significantly, Fred Niblo’s Ben-Hur (1925). Between 1925 and 1928 Wyler directed more than two dozen silent westerns before graduating to the more prestigious genre of romantic comedy with Anybody Here Seen Kelly? (1928). The Love Trap and The Shakedown (both 1929) were Wyler’s first partial talkies. The western Hell’s Heroes (also 1929), shot on location near Death Valley, was the director’s first all-talking feature film.

Films of the 1930s

Wyler’s first films of the 1930s—The Storm (1930), A House Divided (1931), Tom Brown of Culver (1932), and Her First Mate (1933)—were unremarkable. Considerably more distinguished was Counsellor at Law (1933), a bold-for-its-time examination of anti-Semitism that was adapted by Elmer Rice from his own play and starred John Barrymore. Wyler followed the melodrama Glamour (1934) with the comedy The Good Fairy (1935), a clever adaptation of a Ferenc Molnár play by Preston Sturges that starred Margaret Sullavan, whom Wyler had recently married. Successful though it was, The Good Fairy would prove to be Wyler’s last picture at Universal after 11 years there. After making the forgettable romantic comedy The Gay Deception (1935) at Twentieth Century-Fox, Wyler signed with Samuel Goldwyn in 1936.

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Wyler’s first film for Goldwyn was These Three (1936), Lillian Hellman’s translation of her controversial play The Children’s Hour, with its accusations of lesbianism replaced by those of an immoral heterosexual relationship in response to the strictures of the Production Code, established in 1930 to enforce moral responsibility in the motion-picture industry. Joel McCrea, Merle Oberon, and Miriam Hopkins starred, and Bonita Granville was nominated for an Academy Award as best actress for her portrayal of a private school student who accuses her teachers of indecency. This was Wyler’s first collaboration with cinematographer Gregg Toland, whose deep-focus composition would become an important element of Wyler’s filmmaking craft.

Dodsworth (1936) was a classy transposition of a Broadway hit, with Sidney Howard adapting his play (based on the Sinclair Lewis novel). Walter Huston was nominated for an Academy Award as best actor for his re-creation of his stage performance as a retired auto magnate whose sojourn to Europe opens his eyes to his wife’s transparent status seeking and his heart to the attentions of a sympathetic widow (played by Mary Astor). The film also was nominated for an Academy Award, as was Wyler, who, in the space of a year, had established himself as one of Hollywood’s premier talents.

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After completing Come and Get It (1936) for Howard Hawks, who had clashed with Goldwyn, Wyler then took on Sidney Kingsley’s socially conscious Broadway drama Dead End (1937). Adapted by Hellman, it featured Humphrey Bogart as a gangster and introduced filmgoers to the Dead End Kids, a group of young actors who reprised their stage roles as the members of a neighbourhood gang and would do so again in a number of subsequent films. The film, cinematographer Toland, and Claire Trevor (best supporting actress) were nominated for Academy Awards.

Wyler’s next project, Jezebel (1938), was an attempt by Warner Brothers to exploit the national publicity David O. Selznick had been fostering in anticipation of the release of Gone with the Wind (1939). Though Wyler’s version of the antebellum South was not mounted with the grandeur (or the Technicolor) of its more famous counterpart, it did have Bette Davis, who gave one of her most memorable performances, as a New Orleans belle who shatters the city’s social conventions. Davis (who was having an affair with the now-divorced Wyler) won the Academy Award award for best actress; Fay Bainter was honoured as best supporting actress; and the film was nominated as best picture.

Wuthering Heights (1939), Wyler’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel of the same name, remains one of the most enduring screen romances from this period. Laurence Olivier was mesmerizing as Heathcliff opposite Oberon’s Cathy. The film was nominated for an Academy Award as best picture and received a bevy of other nominations—including those for Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (best screenplay), Wyler (best director), Olivier (best actor), and Geraldine Fitzgerald (best supporting actress)—but only Toland won, for best cinematography.