Gore Vidal on movie director William Wyler: “Whatever was in a script, Wyler rendered faithfully: when he was given a bad script, he would make not only a bad movie, but the script’s particular kind of badness would be revealed in a way that could altogether too easily boomerang on the too skillful director. But when the script was good (of its kind, of its kind!), there was no better interpreter”.
I love Vidal’s insistence on “of its kind”: it is a rueful reminder that movies are, well, movies, and that most of the pleasures they offer are not meant to be transcendent, but rather a cheering way to get through a rainy afternoon.
Beyond that, the assessment of Wyler seems fair. He did not, like John Ford (on a good day), Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder, take possession of a movie, so that its style, substance and character were recognizably his own. He is not much venerated by those who venerate directors. His best known movie now is surely Ben-Hur, and, as Wyler said to Vidal when pleading for help with its script, “this is awful”.
Yet Wyler directed at least one great movie, one that deserves to be far better known. This is The Best Years of Our Lives, made in 1946. Its subject is the return of three soldiers from WW2 to their hometown in the Midwest. As with The Third Man, from three years later, much of its power comes from its possessing the immediacy of live footage. While The Best Years of Our Lives has the solid structure of a classic melodrama, and was written by the proficient playwright Robert E. Sherwood, one leaves it feeling that one has not so much been told a story, as truly looked into a set of moments in the lives of homecoming soldiers, with all the bitterness and tenderness those homecomings entailed.
Much contributes to this—Wyler’s unaffected direction; earnest, pained performances; the sober and precise photography of the great Gregg Toland; and, most famously, the presence of Harold Russell, playing a soldier, Homer, who has had both hands blown off and replaced with hooks. Russell was not an actor with prosthetics: he really was a soldier whose hands had been blown off and replaced with hooks.
In the movie, Russell’s character had been engaged to a girl, Wilma (Cathy O’Donnell), before the war. I know of no more moving scene in any movie than the one where Homer takes Wilma up to his bedroom to try to make her understand what his life with the hooks is like. He does this not to solicit her pity, but so that she will know better than to marry such a damaged man.
“Homer: I’ve learned how to take this harness off. I can wiggle into my pyjama top. I’m lucky, I have my elbows. Some of the boys don’t. But I can’t button ’em up.
Wilma: I’ll do that, Homer.
Homer: This is when I know I’m helpless. My hands are down there on the bed. I can’t put them on again without calling to somebody for help. I can’t smoke a cigarette or read a book. If that door should blow shut, I can’t open it and get out of this room. As dependent as a baby that doesn’t know how to get anything except cry for it. Well, now you know, Wilma. Now you have an idea of what it is. I guess you don’t know what to say. It’s all right. Go on home. Go away, like your family said.
Wilma: I know what to say, Homer. I love you. And I’m never going to leave you”.
I have tears in my eyes merely typing those lines. I doubt they would have the same effect on someone who’d not seen the movie. But even though I first saw The Best Years of Our Lives thirty years ago, that scene, and many others, still shimmers in my memory. Wyler, as Vidal wrote, could get a great movie out of a good script.
