William Wyler

• Born: July 1, 1902
• Birthplace: Mühausen, Alsace, Germany (now Mulhouse, France)
• Died: July 27, 1981
• Place of death: Beverly Hills, California

German-born director

A perfectionist, Wyler directed highly acclaimed film versions of literary masterpieces, such as Wuthering Heights (1939), and he won awards for the notable The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which sensitively captured the social and the political atmosphere of the post-World War II era.

Area of achievement: Entertainment

Early Life

William Wyler (WI-lur) was born in Alsace, a region on the border of France and Germany that was then a part of the German empire. An unruly child, he did not do well in school, but at an early age he was exposed to the arts, especially to concerts, the theater, and the early cinema.

When Wyler showed no interest in or aptitude for the family’s haberdashery business, his mother, Melanie, contacted her cousin, Carl Laemmle, one of the founders of Universal Pictures, the first major film studio established in Hollywood. She knew that Laemmle made frequent trips to Europe and hired promising young men to work in the developing motion-picture business.

Thus, in 1921, Wyler began work as a messenger boy for the Universal Pictures office in New York City. Starting at the lowest position in the motion-picture business made Wyler unique among his generation of Hollywood directors, who did not experience the kind of long apprenticeship that made Wyler familiar with every aspect of the industry.

In 1923, Wyler moved to Hollywood to work on various crews cleaning and moving film sets. Just two years later, he got a job as an assistant director on the Universal lot. There he learned to make quick, cheap films, especially Westerns. Although these films were all shot according to a formula that allowed little opportunity for artistic innovation, Wyler learned a good deal about how to shoot and to frame a film’s action in economical and entertaining ways.

Wyler was rewarded for his diligence with films of increasing importance. It was then that he began to acquire a reputation as a painstaking craftsman, often reshooting scenes until he achieved the effects that he discovered only by reworking his actors’ scenes.

Life’s Work

Although Wyler made several feature-length films for Universal in both the silent and the early sound eras, he did not distinguish himself as a director until he began to work for the independent producer Samuel Goldwyn. Although Goldwyn and Wyler often quarreled, they made a great team because both men were perfectionists who excelled in adapting superb works of literature for the screen.

Between 1936 and 1946, Wyler directed an astounding series of highly acclaimed and popular films: Dodsworth(1936), These Three (1936), Dead End (1937), Wuthering Heights (1939), The Westerner (1940), The Little Foxes (1941), Mrs. Miniver (1942), and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). These films are notable for capturing the social and the political atmosphere of the Depression and World War II periods. Dead End, for example, is an adaptation of Sidney Kingsley’s searing Broadway drama about slum life in New York, and Mrs. Miniver, telling the story of a heroic family adjusting to the bombing of their home and to wartime exigencies, became synonymous with the British fighting spirit.

Wyler protested and learned to surmount the censorship of the Hollywood production code and the conservatism of his employer, Goldwyn. Perhaps the greatest example of Wyler’s triumph is his direction of The Best Years of Our Lives, the story of three servicemen returning home to a society that understands little about the traumas veterans have experienced. How to resume a life that has been interrupted by cataclysmic events bedevils a character such as Fred Derry, a soda jerk before the war, who returns to an unfaithful wife and a job for which he is no longer fit. Derry (played with exquisite sensitivity by Dana Andrews) is shown in a scene near the end of the film reliving his wartime experience as a bombardier. Wyler directed the scene without flashbacks, trusting his actor to register a complex series of emotions as he sat in the wreckage of a bomber in a scrap yard. Although actors often complained of Wyler’s incessant request for retakes, no Hollywood director ever elicited better performances from actors such as Gary Cooper, Bette Davis, and Greer Garson.

The Best Years of Our Lives also reflects Wyler’s own grappling with his wartime experiences. During the war, he directed documentaries for the Army Air Force, The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944) and Thunderbolt! (not released until 1947). During this work, which entailed considerable flying and exposure to the deafening noises of bombing runs, Wyler lost much of his hearing. He doubted he would be able to resume his Hollywood career, although he eventually found a way to plug his hearing aid into the sound systems used on film sets. Nevertheless, his very real anxieties about adjusting to the postwar world surely contributed to his sensitive direction of The Best Years of Our Lives.

Although critics have been less impressed with Wyler’s work after 1946, he won an Academy Award for his direction of Ben-Hur (1959), and his direction of The Heiress (1949), based on Henry James’s novella Washington Square (1880), is ranked among his finest achievements.

After a brief marriage to the actor Margaret Sullavan, Wyler married Margaret Tallichet on October 23, 1938. The couple had five children and remained happily married. Known as “Talli,” Mrs. Wyler made friends with several of Wyler’s collaborators, such as Lillian Hellman, who was often a guest at the Wylers’ home. Wyler died of a heart attack in 1981.

Significance

Wyler is regarded as one of the greatest contract directors in the history of Hollywood. Most of his work was done for major studios or under contract to Goldwyn, which meant Wyler was never independent of his employers. Nevertheless, his work shows a versatility and a finesse that transcend the limitations of the rigid house styles of Hollywood studios. Wyler was especially adept at composition—at placing actors within a scene to maximize the dramatic impact of the dialogue and the cinematography. This is why his collaborations with writers such as Hellman and cinematographers such as Gregg Toland are often emphasized in accounts of the director’s work. At the same time Wyler embraced the conventions of mainstream filmmaking and resisted efforts to make his films expressions of his own background. A case in point is his work on Counsellor at Law (1933), a film about a Jewish lawyer starring John Barrymore. Wyler objected to Barrymore’s attempt to develop a vocabulary of gestures the actor deemed Jewish. Barrymore even suggested that Wyler should be sympathetic to Barrymore’s efforts because of the director’s Jewish background. Wyler countered that the lawyer Barrymore played would not pick up a telephone or perform other similar actions in some kind of identifiable Jewish way. Wyler did not seem uncomfortable dealing with ethnic characters, however, since he was notably successful in directing the Jewish actor Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl (1968), a film based on the life of Jewish comedian Fanny Brice.

Bibliography

Anderegg, Michael. William Wyler. Boston: Twayne, 1979. An insightful commentary on Wyler’s directing style with little information about his life and relationships with actors, friends, and family. Includes a chronology, notes, bibliography, and filmography.

Herman, Jan. A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood’s Most Acclaimed Director. New York: Putnam, 1996. Written with the cooperation of Wyler’s family, friends, and associates. Includes filmography, notes, and bibliography.

Madsen, Axel. William Wyler: The Authorized Biography. New York: Thomas Crowell, 1973. This comprehensive biography includes extensive notes, a list of Wyler’s awards, filmography, and bibliography.

Miller, Gabriel, ed. William Wyler: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. A comprehensive collection, including three previously unpublished interviews.