William Wyler (36 page)

Wyler's next assignment for the military was to tell the story of the P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bombers of the Twelfth Air Force, focusing on the Fifty-Seventh Fighter Group stationed at the Alto air base on Corsica. In a memo, Edward Munson Jr., the acting chief of army pictorial services, reported that Wyler “is proceeding to the Mediterranean Theater on orders from General Arnold and General Baker to make a film on air cooperation with ground and naval forces.”
⁶⁸
Once again, Wyler asked Lester Koenig to write the script, and he also invited John Sturges, a lieutenant in the air force and the future director of
Bad Day at Black Rock, The Magnificent Seven
, and
The Great Escape
, to be his codirector. Sturges had worked as an editor for David Selznick and had already edited dozens of air force training films. Wyler was enthusiastic about the project, declaring in a memo that “the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations affords splendid opportunities for making an excellent motion picture portraying the work of the Tactical Air Force.”
⁶⁹

Thunderbolt
's subject was the use of tactical airpower in support of ground troops. The Thunderbolt fighter-bombers had been engaged in the war since 1942 and were considered, along with the German Focke Wulf 190, the most durable and substantial aircraft, capable of taking more punishment than other planes. The documentary was to show how Allied strafing and bombing of German railroad lines and bridges behind the front broke the stalemate that had been holding up the advance of the U.S. Fifth and British Eighth Armies. Those land forces had been stymied for five months at Cassino, a mountainous area and a vital target on the German held Gustav Line. The Allies' Operation Strangle, designed to cut off all shipping to the front, was Wyler's subject.

The Thunderbolts were already equipped with cameras to verify reports of downed enemy planes. Whenever a pilot began firing, a camera attached to the trigger began filming the targets. Wyler and his crew installed additional cameras on the planes' tails, under the wings, and in the cockpits, and connected them to Start and Stop buttons on the control panels. The pilots who agreed to these installations (some did not) became camera operators in addition to their other duties.

Because the Thunderbolt's design accommodated only a single pilot, Wyler was unable to go along on any missions, as he had done when filming
Memphis Belle
. Forced to entrust the aerial filming to the pilots, Wyler felt compelled to accumulate as much ground footage as possible. Within days of his landing at Caserta, Wyler commandeered a jeep and followed the infantry into Rome for that city's liberation. Working as his own cameraman, he captured the jubilant mood as the city was freed from fascist rule. Wyler went to Mussolini's balcony, where he filmed a civilian scraping a Nazi sign off a wall, and he also attended the pope's first press conference with Allied journalists and photographers at the Vatican. (The papal press conference did not appear in the film.) Wyler then spent the next few months driving around Italy: “He traveled north from Rome following a zigzag path toward the front in central Italy. He filmed bomb damage where Thunderbolts had destroyed bridges and railroads in the battle against Field Marshal Kesserling's forces.”
⁷⁰

To get additional footage of Thunderbolts in the air, Wyler convinced General Eaker to assign a North American B-25 to the camera unit. Through the B-25's doors and windows, cameras could be pointed in almost any direction. Wyler went along on these flights, but because of the deafening noise on the plane (from the engine and the wind), he had some trouble communicating with his cameramen (one in the back and one below). Nonetheless, he managed to get some extraordinary footage.

By the end of September, Wyler felt he had at least enough film for a rough cut. He and Sturges flew back to London, where they spent about a month editing the film and blowing up usable footage to 35mm. In October, Wyler came down with flulike symptoms and stayed at the Claridge Hotel to recuperate. He wrote to a friend, “I'm not sure whether it is the English weather, or whether I'm getting too darned old for this war.”
⁷¹
Wyler liked the footage they had prepared, so he sent Koenig and Sturges to Hollywood to do some further editing and to write the narration. Wyler stayed behind because he did not want to miss the fall of Berlin. He obtained orders to proceed to Paris, where Colonel George Stevens was filming for the Sixth Army; Stevens would soon record the liberation of a number of concentration camps and would take some of the first pictures of the horrors perpetrated there. Stevens loaned Wyler a driver—Leicester Hemingway (Ernest's brother)—and he saw a great deal of the European front. Wyler even managed to return to his hometown, Mulhouse, where, to his delight, he discovered that his father's store was still standing. The caretaker had saved Wyler's share of the profits, which she proudly presented to him. Upon his return to General Spaatz's headquarters, Wyler learned that the
Hollywood Reporter
had reported him missing in action. He frantically wired his wife to reassure her of his safety. Talli, however, had been on a trip to Mexico and was unaware of the news.

In an attempt to get more “atmosphere shots,” as he called them, Wyler went up one last time in the B-25. But when the plane landed at Grossetto, he could not hear and had trouble walking straight. He was examined and sent home, temporarily deaf. After months of testing at various air force hospitals in the East, he recovered some hearing in his left ear. The eventual diagnosis was that the nerve had been damaged and there was no cure. Although his hearing remained impaired, Wyler was able to make some adjustments to compensate. He would plug himself into his sound man's microphones, listening to scenes through a set of headphones: “This way, instead of hearing the scene from behind the camera, you hear it as it happens on the soundtrack.”
⁷²
For the rest of his life, Wyler would receive $60 a month from the U.S. government as compensation for his hearing loss.

Thunderbolt
shares similarities in narrative structure and theme with
Memphis Belle
but lacks its force and its cumulative emotional effect. Koenig's script was less poetic and more descriptive than the one he contributed to the earlier film. Too often, the narration merely duplicates what we are seeing on the screen, and when Wyler's images are striking and arresting—such as the scenes of the planes strafing German railroad cars and tracks—it seems intrusive. The central difference, of course, is that
Thunderbolt
lacks a personal drama, whereas
Belle
is structured around the suspense of the “final mission” and the communal values shared by the crew—a group the audience has followed throughout the film. The later work lacks this unifying thread of a group dynamic, and although some members of the unit are introduced early on, they all disappear, with the exception of Gil Wyman, the leader. Koenig inadvertently highlights the problem in his notes for an early treatment: “The treatment indicates a rather full documentary coverage of the way a Tactical Air Force works. There is no really personal story as there was in Memphis Belle.”
⁷³

Koenig tries to compensate for this lack of a personal element by inserting multiple sequences of the crew on Corsica, either preparing for flight or relaxing. And while some of these moments are endearing or comic, they provide little more than additional documentary-style information. In the first sequence, we see soldiers brushing their teeth, washing out their helmets, and combing their hair; in another, they are swimming, waterskiing, playing with puppies, and reading. In his initial notes on the squadron's briefing, Koenig writes, “Keeping in mind the tension we want to build for the morning mission, we follow the pilots through their typical routine.”
⁷⁴
Unfortunately, the film never builds any tension, either in that sequence or elsewhere.

Koenig attempts to duplicate his blank-verse narration, but again, instead of heightening the mood with poetic and abstract effects, the verse is merely informational. In his revised treatment, he writes:

There are two main divisions of air power.

Strategic—heavy bombers and

Their fighter escort destroy

Enemy productions at long range.

Hammer the heart of the war effort.

Tactical—when we meet the enemy on the ground—

mediums and fighter bombers prevent his

moving supplies and reinforcements to the front.

Destroy his transport. His communications.

Cut his troops from the rear.
⁷⁵

The film does contain some of Wyler's most extraordinary flying sequences, particularly the shots of the squadron flying from Corsica to Italy. The camera follows the planes' upward movements as they separate from one another and climb toward 10,000 to 12,000 feet. The pilots' point-of-view shots of the land below, juxtaposing images of farm animals and potential targets, followed by the bombing of bridges or roads and, in particular, the point-of-view shots of strafing as the planes fly low to the ground, are electrifying and breathtaking.

There is too little of this firsthand excitement, however. Instead, the film details how the war effort in Italy changed in 1944. The two narrators, Eugene Kern and Lloyd Bridges, describe how the military brass decided that the most effective way to break the long stalemate at Anzio was to bomb the Germans behind their lines and thus deprive them of food, fuel, and reinforcements. They then proceeded to use their airpower to blow up train tracks, bridges, and roads.

The end of the war forestalled the need to obtain a commercial release for the film. Suddenly, there was not much enthusiasm for it, even in the air force. Wyler wrote numerous letters trying to drum up interest in the film, and in a letter to Francis Harmon, he expressed his frustration: “My personal disappointment over this is of no consequence, but the disappointment of all the Army Air Forces…is I believe something to be considered…. I think the picture of their vital contribution to the war effort deserves a better place than a shelf in the Pentagon building, particularly since no one quarrels with the quality of the picture.”
⁷⁶
In a later letter to Harmon, he suggested that a studio such as Republic—which has “not been burdened heavily with the distribution of Government films during the war”—might be willing to take it on. Wyler added, “I don't want to leave any stone unturned in an effort to bring the picture to the people who have paid for it.”
⁷⁷

Wyler maintained that a variety of conditions beyond his control contributed to the delay in producing a finished film. The main problem was his reliance on the automatic cameras installed in the planes—“for months we were unable to know the results, and the ratio of usable film was less than 1%.” Another difficulty was the need to transform 16mm prints into 35mm Technicolor prints, which was “entirely in the hands of Technicolor.”
⁷⁸
The company's technicians took their time with the process. And, of course, the war ended sooner than anyone expected.

Wyler arranged a screening of
Thunderbolt
for the Hollywood trade press in October 1945 and tried to get the War Department involved. Unfortunately, distributors were now indifferent to war documentaries, and Wyler failed to drum up any interest. Finally, in 1947, Monogram decided to release
Thunderbolt
. The studio agreed to keep 75 percent of the profits and turn over 25 percent to the U.S. Treasury. Monogram also decided to donate 25 percent of its profits to the Army Air Force Aid Society. In an effort to increase the film's box-office potential, Jimmy Stewart agreed to donate his services and provide a short introduction to the film. But even his remarks acknowledged that the events portrayed were now “ancient history.”

The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946)

When Wyler returned from Europe after the war, his feelings about his life and profession had changed. He told Hermine Isaacs, “No one could go through that experience and come out the same. You couldn't live among war-torn civilians, among airmen flying missions and ground crews waiting for their return without learning about people and how they function as individuals.”
¹
Twenty years later, he elaborated, “The war had been an escape into reality. In the war it didn't matter how much money you earned. The only thing that mattered were human relationships…. Only relationships with people who might be dead tomorrow were important.”
²

He still owed Goldwyn one more film. One planned feature was a life story of Dwight D. Eisenhower, a project Goldwyn had been negotiating for months. Robert Sherwood was working on a screenplay, and there were tentative plans that he and Wyler would go to Germany and spend some time with the general. Wyler, however, was not enthusiastic about the project. He also turned down
The Bishop's Wife
, based on Robert Nathan's 1928 best seller, which Goldwyn wanted for David Niven. What sparked his interest, instead, was a project that Goldwyn had shelved:
Glory for Me
by MacKinlay Kantor.

The producer had originally commissioned the project in 1944, when, on his wife's recommendation, he read a
Time
magazine article entitled “The Way Home,” about marines who were having difficulty readjusting to life after the war.
³
Kantor, who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his Civil War novel
Andersonville
(1955), had flown missions with the Eighth Air Force and the Royal Air Force as a correspondent. He signed an agreement with Goldwyn in September 1944 to come to California to discuss a story idea suitable for a film tentatively called “Home Again”—a variation on the
Time
article title. Kantor later signed a contract to write a fictional adaptation of approximately 100 pages. He was to be paid $12,500, of which he received $5,000 in advance. The story was to be delivered in ten weeks.

Kantor then spent several months touring hospitals and studying the problems of discharged patients before, inexplicably, turning in a novel in verse that ran close to 300 pages. Goldwyn found the blank verse incomprehensible and wanted to shelve the project, but he agreed to let Kantor work on a treatment. When Wyler expressed interest in the project, Goldwyn tried to talk him out of it. “He thought it was nothing—ten thousand wasted,” Wyler recalled.
⁴
But Wyler liked Kantor's story precisely because it was about ordinary soldiers, unlike the Eisenhower project, which focused on leadership at the top. More important, it resonated with Wyler on a personal level: “I knew these people, shared a good many of their experiences.”
⁵

Wyler brought Kantor's material to Robert Sherwood, who was working on the Eisenhower project and had three Pulitzer Prizes for drama to his credit (
Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Idiot's Delight, There Shall Be No Night
), as well as a number of impressive screenwriting credits (
Rebecca, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Divorce of Lady
X). (In fact, he would go on to write
The Bishop's Wife
for Goldwyn in 1947.) In addition, he had served as a speech-writer for President Roosevelt and headed the Office of War Information. Sherwood, too, preferred Kantor's story, and the two of them convinced Goldwyn to go ahead with the project.

Despite his enthusiasm for Kantor's book, Sherwood ultimately decided he did not want to work on the film. In a memo to Goldwyn, story editor Pat Duggan summarized Sherwood's feelings: He was writing a play of his own (
The Rugged Path
) at the time, and he had reservations about adapting Kantor's story. He disagreed with its underlying criticism of civilians and with the basic implication that all returning soldiers were maladjusted. Nonetheless, he believed the book was going to be successful (it was scheduled for publication), and he did not want to be responsible for doing “a typical Hollywood trick of softening a good property.” Sherwood preferred to do an original story, for which he would charge $125,000.
⁶
Goldwyn decided to wait until Sherwood had completed his play, hoping he might see the project in a different light. Instead, Sherwood wrote to Goldwyn on August 27, urging him to abandon the film:

I have been thinking a great deal about “Glory for Me” and I have come to the conclusion that in all fairness, I should recommend to you that we drop it. This is entirely due to the conviction that by next Spring or next Fall, this subject will be terribly out of date…. Willy Wyler said one thing that impressed me tremendously when the three of us were talking in Hollywood a month ago: this picture could prevent a lot of heartaches and even tragedies among servicemen who were confronting demobilization and returning to civilian life. However, the sudden end of the Japanese war has changed all that because, by the time the picture is released, the demobilization process will have been completed in many millions of cases.
⁷

Goldwyn telegrammed Sherwood a week later: “I have more faith in it now than I had six months ago because I feel the subject matter will be even more timely a year from now than it is today. As you said, there will be several million men coming home next year…and to release a picture at that time presenting their problems seems to me to be hitting it right on the head.”
⁸

Sherwood was obviously convinced—he agreed to write a screenplay as soon as his play had opened. In November, Goldwyn reported that he had received forty pages of Sherwood's first draft and noted, “I am very anxious that Wyler and you people read it so that we can begin to line up some of the cast…. The plan as it now stands is to have the first draft ready by the first week in December.”
⁹

Kantor's story follows three men who, after being discharged from the service, return to their midwestern hometown—Boone City, which was modeled after Cincinnati but named for the Boone River in Iowa, near where Kantor grew up. The novel's central character is Fred Derry, an Eighth Air Force bombardier who was a soda jerk in a drugstore before the war and lived on the wrong side of the tracks with his alcoholic father and his stepmother. While in training, he married Marie, a woman he had known only briefly, and after a few days of marriage, he was shipped overseas and eventually became a decorated war hero. On his first night home, Fred finds Marie making love to another man and gives her the money to get a divorce. Al Stephenson, Harvard class of 1924, is a middle-aged man who was an infantry sergeant. He returns home to his wife and two grown children and to his job as assistant vice president of the Cornbelt Trust and Savings. Al soon grows uncomfortable with his job, finding himself torn over reconciling business ethics with the social conscience he developed as a soldier. Kantor also supplies Al and Fred with stream-of-consciousness–style flashbacks that complicate the forward movement of the story. The third character is Homer Wermels, a seaman second class, who was engaged to the girl next door when he left. He returns from the war a spastic, unable to control his movements, and he fears that his fiancée, Wilma, will marry him out of pity. Discovering that drinking allows him to control his movements more effectively, Homer is on the verge of becoming an alcoholic.

Sherwood and his wife arrived in Los Angeles in December 1945 and were put up at the Goldwyns' home while the playwright grappled with the screenplay. One evening, feeling blocked and unable to come up with a dramatic arc that would unite the various strands of the story, Sherwood announced that he was giving up and returning east. But he changed his mind, convinced himself to try one more time, and unlocked the key to his script. Sherwood decided that the central plotline would be the emerging love story of Fred Derry and Peggy Stephenson, Al's daughter. Whereas in Kantor's novel and treatment, Fred discovers his wife's infidelity as soon as he comes home, Sherwood's script has Fred trying to pick up the pieces of his life with Marie but discovering that they were never really in love. In the meantime, he meets Peggy, and a relationship begins to blossom. Sherwood knew he would have to amplify Peggy's role in the story so that “Fred could meet the girl, lose the girl, then get the girl.”
¹⁰
He also used the bar owned by Homer's uncle Butch as a central location where many of the story's dramatic events take place.

Sherwood, with input from Wyler, made other important changes to Kantor's novel and the film outlines he had submitted in December 1944. The most significant change was to the character of Homer Wermels, now renamed Homer Parrish. Wyler told the
New York Times
, “I realized such a character would never ring true; that no actor, no matter how great his talent, could play a spastic with conviction.”
¹¹
At one point, he even considered cutting the character out of the story. Then, at a war bond rally to raise funds for disabled veterans, Wyler saw a documentary entitled
Diary of a Sergeant
, which told the story of Harold Russell, a sergeant in the paratroopers who had lost both hands when a dynamite charge exploded prematurely during maneuvers in North Carolina. The film chronicled Russell's life as he was outfitted with prosthetic hooks and learned to master those devices—as, in Wyler's words, he “rose above his physical limitations” and became “a great object lesson.”
¹²

With an eye toward casting him in the film, Wyler decided to have Russell flown out to Hollywood for an interview. When a Goldwyn executive called him, Russell thought it was a joke. Since being released from Walter Reed Hospital, he had toured for some bond rallies before going home to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work at a local YMCA. After interviewing Russell, Sherwood endorsed the idea of making Homer an amputee, and he supported Wyler's decision to cast Russell in the role. Wyler noted, “No matter how good a performance an actor gave of a man without hands, an audience could assure itself by saying, ‘It's only a movie.' With Russell playing Homer, no such assurance was possible.”
¹³

The resolution of the other characters' stories also involved some important changes. In the book, Al, disgusted with his bank's attitude toward veterans, quits his job and goes into business with another ex-GI to “grow things” and raise flowers. Homer becomes an alcoholic and attempts suicide but fails. He finally becomes convinced of Wilma's love, and as the novel ends, Wilma is studying medical texts in an effort to help him. Fred, frustrated over his inability to find meaningful work, attempts to rob Al's bank, but Al stops him. Fred is rescued by Peggy's love and decides to go back to school on the GI Bill and enter into a business partnership with the drugstore owner.

True to his commitment to realism, Wyler felt (and Sherwood agreed) that solutions to the men's problems should not reflect the dramatic reversals of fortune that might be expected of characters in movies. Sherwood held, for example, that Al Stephenson should not simply quit his job at the bank and go into something else. Millions of real-life veterans would not have the luxury of such an option—most of them would have to persevere and try to change their institutions from within. In the film, therefore, Al stays at the bank, declaring to the president that he will fight for more liberal loan policies for veterans.

Homer's story also has a more effective resolution. In the film, Homer tries to avoid Wilma not because he doesn't love her but because he feels it wouldn't be fair to marry her. To address this sensitive personal issue directly, Sherwood devised a scene in which Homer takes Wilma to his bedroom one night and shows her how difficult it is for him to undress. Wyler later managed to direct the scene without violating the Production Code.

The arc of Fred's story was also revised. Sherwood wanted Fred's experience to demonstrate that returning veterans needed to be realistic and not expect preferential treatment because of their military service. It is Fred's responsibility to find a new job and learn it with the same dedication he applied to his service as a bomber pilot. When he decides to take a job as a laborer in the construction business, the implication is that Fred's fortunes will grow with this burgeoning industry, since more Americans will want houses as the postwar economy continues to grow.

Many of the script problems had been ironed out by the middle of 1946, and Sherwood turned in his final draft on April 9. By then, the project's title had been changed, but agreeing on a new one had been difficult; Goldwyn even did audience tests to gauge responses to such options as “When Daylight Comes,” “Three Roads Home,” and “No More Bugles.” Eventually, however, Sherwood decided to borrow a phrase that Fred uses in a speech to Peggy: dejected over his prospects, he laments that “the best years of my life have been spent”—an idea she rejects.
Glory for Me
thus became
The Best Years of Our Lives
.

Casting the film presented few problems, as Goldwyn wanted to use many of his young contract players to fill the roles. Dana Andrews, who had had a small role in
The Westerner
, would play Fred Derry; Virginia Mayo was cast as his wife Marie; and Cathy O'Donnell, who would later marry Robert Wyler, made her screen debut as Wilma (she also appeared in her brother-in-law's
Detective Story
and
Ben-Hur)
. Goldwyn originally wanted Farley Granger for Homer, but Wyler decided to cast Harold Russell. Teresa Wright, who had costarred in
The Little Foxes
and
Mrs. Miniver
, would play Peggy Stephenson. Goldwyn wanted Fred MacMurray and Olivia de Havilland to play Al and Milly, but neither considered the parts important enough, so Leland Hayward suggested two of his clients, Fredric March and Myrna Loy. Goldwyn doubted that Loy, who was still a major star, would accept such a small part, but to his surprise, after a dinner at his home, she accepted without much prodding and received top billing.