WILLIAM WYLER – CINEMATIC CRAFTSMAN
“It took a Jew to make a really good movie about Christ.” – William Wyler on Ben-Hur.
At the time of his death in 1981, famed Hollywood director William Wyler was considered by his peers as second only to John Ford as a master craftsman of cinema. During his lengthy Hollywood career, Wyler was nominated a record 12 times for an Academy Award and received three Best Director Oscars, second only to Ford's four. Among his other tributes are the Irving Thalberg Award, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences ultimate accolade for a producer. And he was the fourth recipient of the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the third director to be so honored, following John Ford and Orson Welles. Each of these tributes has been fitting amd well-deserved since it has been said that no director – not even Orson Welles – did as much to develop the basic principles of filmmaking technique than did Wyler.
His career spanned 45 years, beginning in the Silent era. While most of his output during the 1920s consisted of “B” Westerns for Universal, in 1929 Wyler directed his first "A" picture, albeit another Western: Hell’s Heroes (1930), Universal's first all-sound movie shot outside a studio. With the success of that film, “Willie” (as he would become known in the industry) was off and running. He directed both Counsellor at Law (1933) and The Good Fairy, 1935 (with his then-wife Margaret Sullavan) for Universal before moving on to begin a fruitful, if at times difficult, association with independent producer Samuel Goldwyn. The titles of his Goldwyn films stand as a roll call of some of Hollywood’s greatest achievements.
Just a few of William Wyler’s early pictures: These Three (1936), based on the Lillian Hellman play Dodsworth (1936), Dead End (1937), Wuthering Heights (1939), The Westerner (1940) and The Little Foxes (1941). On loanout to Warner Brothers, Wyler directed Jezebel (1938) and The Letter (1940), both of which featured Bette Davis in two of her best-remembered roles.
If Wyler was a true cinematic craftsman, he was also known in the industry as a hard-driving perfectionist, frequently requiring tens of takes for every shot in his films. This earned him the nicknanes '90-Take Wyler' and 'Once-More Wyler'. Actress Sylvia Sidney remembered that during the filming of Dead End it was not unusual for Wyler to do numerous retakes and even repetitions of the same dialogue or gestures until he got the “perfect” scene. Miss Sydney recalled that the cutting room floor would be covered with thousands of feet of unused footage.
Wyler was awarded his first Oscar for the classic Mrs. Miniver, 1942 (which also won the Best Picture Award). After serving in the Army Air Corps during WWII, where he filmed two propaganda documentaries, including The Fighting Lady (1944), which won an Oscar for Best Documentary, he directed what has probably become his most famous and endearing feature The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), an affecting and sympathetic look at the plight of returning servicemen. The film was a huge commercial and critical success and garnered for Wyler his second Academy Award, as well as a Best Picture nod for the movie itself. Other post-war successes included: The Heiress (1949), Detective Story (1951), Roman Holiday (1953), Friendly Persuasion (1956) and what is perhaps his crowning achievement, the multi-Oscar winner Ben-Hur (1959) – Wyler’s third Best director Oscar win. His career continued into the 1960s, where he remade his earlier These Three under its original title The Children’s Hour (1961), a more frank examination of Lillian Hellman’s exploration of lesbianism and helmed the dark psychological thriller The Collector (1965). He had his last box office hit with the Barbara Streisand-starrer Funny Girl (1968), for which the novice actress won an Oscar for her first leading role.
It is interesting to note that more actors won Academy Awards in Wyler movies: 14 out of a total of 36 nominations (more than any other two directors combined).
Perhaps the words that best define William Wyler are talented, creative, innovative, but also tough and demanding. But through his demand for perfection, William Wyler left as his legacy a series of classic films that continue to entertain, enlighten and stand the test of time.
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i recently watched wyler’s “roman holiday,” which i was prepared to really dislike, but it won me over with its intelligence; this analogy might not hold up to any scrutiny but i was being all curmudgeonly and things-ain’t-what-they-used-to-be by telling a friend that “roman holiday” is to a current oscar-bait-type film (a ron howard joint, say, or “crash”) what david straithern’s ed murrow is to joe mccarthy in “good night, and good luck”; wyler is stoic,intelligent, articulate, dignified above all else, while yuor current oscar-bait is manipulative, blubbering, and loony, desperate to be liked and insisting on blubbering lunacy as proof of authenticity. dignity wins the battle but blubbering lunacy has won the war. i say this as someone who is deeply suspicious of aesthetic conservatism or vague fondness for golen ages, but it really does seem to me that there has been a real decline.
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