William Wyler (12 page)

In the next scene, back in their dorm room, Karen suggests that Martha join her in converting her grandmother's farmhouse into a school. Here, the action is presented in either two-shots or shot-reverse shots. Rollyson describes this scene as “a kind of proposal,” although he rejects the notion of any sexual attraction between the two women.
²³
Both John Baxter and Bernard F. Dick, however, suggest that Wyler is able to subvert the Breen office's ultimatum by having Hopkins act as if her character, Martha, is in love with Karen.
²⁴
But the film does not support this theory, especially when Wyler shoots most of the “proposal” as a shot-reverse shot that isolates the two friends in separate frames rather than presenting them together. What is indisputable is that the film focuses on Karen and Martha rather than on Mary Tilford.

The opening sequence is thus indicative of the predominant style of
These Three
, which proceeds in a fluid, elegant, and compact manner, much like
The Gay Deception
. Wyler's first collaboration with Gregg Toland is not distinguished by the deep-focus compositions they would later employ, although there are hints of that technique in some scenes. Instead, in this early work, Wyler points Toland's camera work toward suggestive compositions to bring out the film's themes. Wyler makes strides in framing his characters more effectively in relation to each other, thus eliminating some cutting back and forth, but this film utilizes more cuts and close-ups than his other Goldwyn films.

The preamble material, including the introduction of the young man who will complete the central trio, takes up roughly one-third of the film. (The play's opening scene, in which Peggy [the film's Helen] reads from
The Merchant of Venice
, does not occur until half an hour into the film.) After leaving college, Karen and Martha arrive in Lancet, where they find the farmhouse in ruins. While looking the place over, Karen peers through a broken window and sees a mouse—this is Wyler's first use of a shot framed by a window, a motif that will become a metaphor of entrapment. Discouraged by the condition of the house, the two young women consider abandoning their plans when suddenly the sound and then the spectacle of shingles being thrown off the roof attract their attention. This interruption is followed by the appearance of a man in beekeeper's gear and a swarm of bees around his head; he is Joe Cardin, a neighbor and a doctor at the local hospital. He climbs down, introduces himself, and offers to share his lunch. Karen and Martha are hesitant at first but then warm up to him. Their conversation as they sit in the yard is genial and friendly, and Wyler films it with minimal cutting, including all three in the frame to indicate that those two have now become “these three.”

The scene's outdoor setting, like Karen and Martha's taxi ride to the farm, is presented as idyllic. Throughout much of the film, Wyler invests the natural world with a beauty and grace that is conspicuously missing from the formalized social structure that dominates. Like much of Wyler's work,
These Three
is primarily an indoor film, and as such, it introduces Wyler's preoccupation with images of constriction and claustrophobia. This emphasis makes the outdoor scenes in the film all the more startling.

The idyllic mood is further developed as Joe delivers some lumber to the house, which the three are now repairing. Joe drives while Karen lies on her back on the logs, gazing up at the trees and sky as Alfred Newman's romantic music, first heard during the taxi ride, is reprised. (Joe will soon propose to Karen under a tree.) The drive is interrupted by their meeting with Mrs. Tilford (Alma Kruger) and Mary (Granville), who are being chauffeured home. As Joe greets Mrs. Tilford, whom he knows, the shot is framed through her car window—as is her introduction to Karen. Here again, by confining the characters in a tight, constricting frame, Wyler foreshadows the threat Mrs. Tilford and Mary pose to Joe and Karen's romance and to the bucolic time they are sharing. The introduction of Mary is also significant: Wyler's shot lines up Karen (whose head is in the foreground), Mrs. Tilford, and Mary, who is seated beside her grandmother but slightly out of focus. Mrs. Tilford remarks that she knew Karen's grandmother and would like to enroll Mary in the new school. When Mary erupts in a temper tantrum, the scene concludes with inside-outside shots that frame first Mrs. Tilford, then Karen and Joe in the car's window. Karen's excitement at the prospect of obtaining her first pupil is reinforced when Joe tells her that the community follows Mrs. Tilford “like lambs,” but the phrase offers an ominous suggestion, reinforced by the window framing, of how easily Mrs. Tilford will later be able to destroy Karen and Joe. As the lovers drive away, Wyler's camera pulls back to emphasize the natural setting as it envelops Joe's car.

After the proposal scene, the indoor world takes over. The idyll is officially broken in the next scene by the arrival of Lily Mortar, who volunteers her services at the school. As Lily approaches the house (her image framed by a window), Martha's horrified reaction is shared by the audience and the camera. Then, as Lily is speaking to Martha, Wyler employs a modified deep-focus shot to show Karen and Joe descending the staircase, slightly out of focus. Wyler holds this shot for just a moment before cutting to a shot of Karen with Joe behind her, as Lily looks up at them from the foot of the stairs. In this triangular shot, Joe's raised position indicates that he has displaced Lily in Karen and Martha's life.

Over the course of his career, Wyler would become a master at expressing repressed emotional states through visual indexes such as the staircase, used here as an important thematic signpost. Numerous key emotional confrontations in Wyler's films take place on staircases, which he uses to make the characters seem either more or less dominant, depending on the perspective. He utilizes them to great effect in his next Hellman adaptation,
The Little Foxes
.

After Lily's arrival, the school officially opens. Thereafter, the film follows the basic plot of the play, with some modifications in dialogue to accommodate the substitution of an apparent love triangle for the play's lesbian relationship. The character of Mary in
The Children's Hour
is an iago-like villain who loves to read Théophile Gautier's novel
Mademoiselle de Maupin
, about a transvestite heroine, from which she supposedly learns enough about aberrant sex to make her lie believable. In the film, she becomes bent on revenge after being exposed as a liar in three separate instances: for cheating on a Latin translation, for claiming to have picked a bouquet of flowers for Lily when in fact she had retrieved them from the garbage, and for faking a heart attack. So when Joe inadvertently spends the night in Martha's room, Mary exaggerates this innocent incident into a scandalous lie, which provokes her grandmother to exert her influence to have all the girls removed from the school.

The scene depicting Joe's overnight stay in Martha's room is one of Wyler's most elegant and effective sequences. Following his proposal to Karen and her acceptance as they stand under a tree—the outdoor setting underscoring the romantic quality of their attachment—Wyler's camera next moves to Martha alone in her room, where she is preparing to paint a table. When Joe arrives at the school, looking for Karen, Wyler frames him in the door and then double-frames him through a pane of glass from an interior door, again foreshadowing his entanglement in the scandal that will soon ensue. Joe calls out for Karen, but Martha, standing at the top of the stairs, tells him to quiet down (so as not to wake the sleeping girls). Here, the staircase becomes a place where Martha faces her own emotions, the space between her and Joe signifying an unbridgeable emotional gulf. Joe enters her room, and the divide is accentuated as he lies down on the couch and Martha resumes painting the table. As she talks about her childhood, which she spent following her aunt Lily from show to show, Wyler moves his camera away from Joe and toward Martha, pausing for a medium close-up of her face, framed by the table legs, as she concludes, “I was so alone.”

While she is talking, Joe falls asleep, and Martha looks longingly at him. She then goes to sit in a chair, with the fireplace lit significantly behind her. Martha watches Joe as Wyler's camera pans slowly to the right, revealing the snow outside the window—thus visually evoking the fire and ice that are emblematic of these two characters' relationship. Next, there is a dissolve as the camera reverses direction. Time has passed, but Martha is still watching Joe, who wakes abruptly and knocks over a glass of milk. A quick cut shows Mary being awakened by the sound; she then sneaks into the hallway and witnesses Joe's departure, as Martha begins to pick up the pieces of broken glass. The noise also wakens Lily, who enters the room and reminds Martha that Joe and Karen will be marrying in the spring. Depressed over losing both her friend and Joe, Martha starts to cry, as Mary continues to spy from the shadows. The cut to Mary deepens the connection between her malevolence and the fate of the three principals. Wyler's layered mise-en-scène and strategic editing thus manage to convey Martha's loneliness, her feelings of abandonment, and Mary's evil intentions more effectively than Hellman had been able to do in the play.

It is after this scene that Wyler cuts to the “quality of mercy” speech that opens the play but serves here as a herald for Mary's entrance bearing the flowers that will be her undoing. Mary, of course, is the antithesis of mercy, as Karen tries to show the girl after catching her lies. Mary rejects Karen's admonitions and is punished. Angry and bitter about her punishment, she runs away from school and then tells her grandmother the lie that will upend all their lives. The sequence in which Mary informs her grandmother that Martha is having an affair with Joe concludes with Mary at the top of the stairs and Mrs. Tilford below, having been persuaded by the lie. The power has now shifted to Mary, who seems to be in control of events.

The confrontation between Mrs. Tilford and the victims of Mary's lie is another display of Wyler's emerging style. Again, there are minor modifications of the play, such as when Joe announces that “three people” (instead of two) are coming before her “with their lives spread on the table.” Martha, Karen, and Joe enter together and appear posed, shot from a low angle to emphasize their moral stature and the rightness of their position. Wyler repeats this grouping a number of times during the scene, even staging some of the dialogue sequences with all four (including Mrs. Tilford) in the frame without cuts. However, most of the sequence proceeds traditionally, with a cut to each member of the trio as he or she emerges to make a statement and then retreats back to the group.

Wyler next repeats the grouping of the three in the courtroom scene, where they face a jury that is filmed as if its members were a single unit— uniform and intolerant of difference. This image echoes the impression created in the graduation scene, with its visual evocation of a society that marches in step. At the end of the trial, when the jury finds against the three, the onlookers break into applause, as if confirming the societal acceptance of Mary's lie.

The dialogue that opens act 3 of
The Children's Hour
is some of Hellman's best writing. As the two women exchange words that are bare, static, and brutal, the playwright indicates that their previous vitality has been drained and life has lost its meaning. They seem to occupy the sterile world depicted by the absurdist playwrights twenty years later:

M
ARTHA
: it's cold here.

K
AREN
: Yes.

M
ARTHA
: What time is it?

K
AREN
: I don't know. What's the difference?
²⁵

In filming this sequence, Wyler finds a visual equivalent for the stark dialogue. The scene opens with a view of the school's exterior. The yard is full of leaves, the atmosphere overcast and desolate, making the place look even more forbidding than it did when Karen and Martha first saw it in its run-down condition. At that point, they were viewing it in the light of day; now, it appears dark and hopeless. The camera finds the two women seated before a fireplace, speechless, and then pulls back, framing them in the window as the rain begins to fall.

In both the play and the film, Karen sends Joe away. The play's Karen simply feels that they need some time apart, while the film's Karen still has doubts about Joe and Martha. When Karen admits to her friend that she had suspicions about Joe even before Mary's lie, Martha clutches her hand in sympathy, a gesture that is repeated from the first part of the film and a trope that Wyler will employ again at key emotional moments in later films. Finally, in this film's last staircase scene, Martha admits to loving Joe as Karen climbs the stairs—it is a symbolic movement that Wyler will repeat at the end of
Jezebel
, when Amy leaves Julie at the bottom of the staircase, effectively granting her permission to care for Preston. At this confessional moment in
These Three
, Martha is left standing at the foot of the stairs, looking up as Karen ascends, seemingly having renounced her love—as Catherine Sloper will do at the end of
The Heiress
.

As in the play, the film's action is partially resolved by the recovery of the stolen bracelet. In the play, a remorseful Mrs. Tilford calls on Karen to apologize for her actions, but in the film, Martha goes to Mrs. Tilford and asks her to call on Karen and encourage her to go back to Joe. In a later scene, Karen finds Joe in a coffeehouse in Vienna, where they embrace and kiss, to the delight of the patrons.

This ending was undoubtedly a last-minute contrivance. Hellman had offered a version of this conclusion in her October 8 screenplay, but that scene ends with Karen staring through the window of a Viennese bakery and then laughing before running up the steps of the nearby hospital. The November 23 version merely notes at the end, “Tag end to follow.” This notation is preceded by Martha's farewell instructions to Karen: “Go back to Joe—wherever he is. Tell him that you believe him now. I'm going to leave you Karen…. I'll be all right now. I'm sure of that. Very sure.”
²⁶
Goldwyn, who liked happy endings, may have insisted on the Viennese finale to assure the audience of the couple's reunion, but its actual provenance is not clear.