William Wyler, Hollywood's Finest Director?

DeeF · 01-14-2005, 02:40 PM

...just asking the question. I've started a new thread/list about Wyler, since I've added so many of his movies to my collection in the last few months. The Letter and Carrie are the latest additions.

Here's my collection of Wyler films, in reverse chronological order like IMDB:

Funny Girl (1968 )
How to Steal a Million (1966) (perhaps the worst of these)
The Collector (1965)
The Children's Hour (1961)
Ben-Hur (1959)
The Big Country (1958 ) (the second worst)
Friendly Persuasion (1956)
Roman Holiday (1953)
Carrie (1952)
The Heiress (1949) (from TCM) (a masterpiece)
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) (my particular favorite)
Mrs. Miniver (1942)
The Little Foxes (1941)
The Letter (1940)
The Westerner (1940) (from TCM)
Wuthering Heights (1939) (from TCM)
Jezebel (1938 )
Dead End (1937) (from TCM)
Dodsworth (1936)
These Three (1936) (video)
Counsellor at Law (1933) (from TCM)

It's a pretty good overview of his sound movies, though there are a lot of silents missing. Prominent sound movies missing include Desperate Hours (1955) and Detective Story (1951).

Matt Butler · 01-14-2005, 03:03 PM

Quote:

How to Steal a Million (1966) (perhaps the worst of these)

I liked How to Steal a Million!

I still need the DVD.

Ernest Rister · 01-14-2005, 03:09 PM

Steven Spielberg holds him in high regard, particularly his ability to shift gears and work in multiple genres.

DeeF · 01-14-2005, 03:09 PM

It isn't a bad movie, Matt, sorry to imply that. It's very light though, and as a light comedy, it isn't terribly funny or memorable. Roman Holiday is better by far.

The Wyler movie that comes out this week is Carrie, with Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones. It's based on the Dreiser novel, and might be Olivier's greatest screen performance.

Edwin Pereyra · 01-14-2005, 03:19 PM

I like a lot of his films especially, Dodsworth. Its nice to see a thread like this remember a great director such as William Wyler and his works.

~Edwin

**HTF Ads**

DeeF · 01-14-2005, 03:21 PM

I'm not sure why I think of him as the greatest director. He wasn't liked by many people. He doesn't have a single movie with the caché of Citizen Kane, or even Gone with the Wind. He wasn't an auteur that had a recognizable style.

And yet, look at that list. Nearly every film is memorable, an amazing collection of "hits." And they're all so different. He could make plays into movies better than anyone else (Dead End, The Little Foxes, The Heiress), turn complex novels into wonderful complex movies (Dodsworth, Wuthering Heights), do charming light comedy (Roman Holiday) and heart-stopping thrillers (Desperate Hours), and often made successes out of his own exercises, like the best "epic," Ben-Hur, and a musical, Funny Girl, successful in its time where all other musicals were failures.

Wyler was simply the champion Hollywood studio director for genre films, bar none.

Joe Karlosi · 01-14-2005, 03:40 PM

BEN-HUR (1959) often gets my vote as the Best Film Ever Made. It's brilliant, frame after frame after frame.

Edwin Pereyra · 01-14-2005, 03:44 PM

DeeF · 01-14-2005, 04:01 PM

Here's Glenn Erickson, the DVD Savant, on The Little Foxes. I quote this here because I hardly could have put it better (hope this is copasetic):

Quote:

The Little Foxes is so fresh and immediate an experience, that it's hard to believe that was made in 1941, sixty years ago. An almost perfect play adaptation, its simple theme has not dated at all. Unlike most movies, the only way to tell its vintage is through the faces of its actors - this could be a 1992 movie, easily.

Savant spun up this Goldwyn classic expecting to see another Bette Davis acting-fest, which admittedly can be very good experience. Even a weird soap like Mr. Skeffington is engaging when Davis is involved. The Little Foxes is not just a movie-star picture, but a director's movie. I'm finally rounding out seeing most of William Wyler's movies. With each one it is becoming more obvious that shot-for-shot he's a supremely superior director. His scenes are built around the drama instead of a strong personal style so he's not as distinctive as Hitchcock, Ford, or Hawks. But after you've seen a few, especially those films he made with Gregg Toland, his style jumps out immediately.

The prime principle in studio films was to make everything seamless, for cuts to be 'invisible' and for showoff technique to be shunned in the service of drawing the audience into the story. MGM achieved at least the first half of this theory in most of its movies, which unfortunately have a dull sameness - you can scarcely tell a Tay Garnett, from a Robert Z. Leonard, from a Victor Fleming. But Wyler's camera was always distinctive, his scenes blocked in perfectly judged masters, his camera firmly in the exact right place. He's visually more varied than Ford, and more fluid than Hawks. You get the idea that Wyler is expressing less his personal attitudes toward the material, than letting the material express itself. Just about the only Wyler-ism that I've seen crop up in every film, is the staging of crucial scenes around staircases of one kind or another. The Heiress, Come and Get It, The Desperate Hours and this picture have such strong 'stair' scenes that just the appearance of a staircase in something like Friendly Persuasion or The Best Years of Our Lives draws our attention immediately.

Savant is less a judge of actors, but can see that Wyler's knack for bringing out the best in his collaborators is no fluke. Not only did a great like Bette Davis make her best pictures for him, but so did everyone from Fredric March to Charlton Heston. In The Little Foxes Davis is one of ten performers that Wyler orchestrates on screen, and never do you get the idea that this is a star vehicle. Newcomer Teresa Wright (so young!) is adorable in every scene. Nefarious relatives Charles Dingle and Carl Benton Reid do great work. Dan Duryea plays such an annoying jerk so convincingly, that you want to reward him with some starring roles instead of the string of villains he ended up with for a career. *1 I'd only seen Patricia Collinge in Shadow of a Doubt, and she's even more heartbreaking here. She only made seven films, but I remember her in six of them.

Julian Lalor · 01-14-2005, 04:33 PM

No, that would be Howard Hawks. Hawks covered every genre, and did them all brilliantly. Wyler's work tends to bombast, particularly as he got older (The Children's Hour is, simply, terrible, particularly in light of These Three). He also wasn't very good at comedy.