William Wyler (57 page)

During filming, Streisand had several run-ins on the set with Ray Stark, but Wyler claimed he got along with his star: “What captivated me was, of course, Barbra, and my principal concern was to present her under the best possible conditions as a new star and a new personality. She was terribly eager, like Bette Davis used to be, to do different and new things. She wanted everything to be the very best. The same as I do.” He elaborated on that statement: “She fusses over things, she's terribly concerned about how she looks, with the photography, the camera, the makeup, the wardrobe, the way she moves, reads a line. She'd tell the cameraman that one of the lights was out—way up on the scaffold. If the light that was supposed to be on her was out, she saw it. She's not easy, but she's difficult in the best sense of the word—the same way I'm difficult.”
²⁰

Wyler admitted he had trouble with Streisand at first, but he managed to establish that he was in charge: “She was a bit obstreperous in the beginning. But things were ironed out when she discovered some of us knew what we were doing.”
²¹
In fact, he exerted his control on the first day of filming, which began with location shooting in Newark, New Jersey, and New York City. (Wyler was using Newark's Penn Station as a substitute for the Baltimore train station.) Streisand recalls: “I asked him, ‘What if we do a takeoff on Garbo's entrance in
Anna Karenina
, where this beautiful woman appears through a cloud of smoke, except Fanny would come out coughing through the smoke?' He didn't go for that, but he did let me do a version of my cough a bit later. He was always open to suggestions, even from me, who had never done a movie before.”
²²

Funny Girl
was a huge financial success. It cost about $10 million to make and grossed $66 million, remaining on the list of top moneymaking films for a long time. At the end of his career, Wyler thus showed that he could make an epic film better than DeMille and could more than hold his own with a musical.
Funny Girl
still ranks among the best examples of how to transfer a musical to the screen. In this musical-dramatic project, he succeeded, in part, by paring down the musical numbers and adding some period songs staged in theaters to provide the flavor and look of period pieces. Other songs, such as “People” and “My Man,” are presented simply as monologues, without any trappings; as a result, they do not seem so jarring onscreen, as many overblown numbers staged outdoors often do. Most important, Wyler gave
Funny Girl
what he called “the illusion of movement,” while retaining the playwright's interest in focusing dramatic scenes within a circumscribed area. Ultimately, it is his effective use of the camera as it moves through space and his characteristic lengthy takes, deep-focus photography, and long shots that make
Funny Girl
such an intelligent adaptation. As in his dramatic adaptations, Wyler allows the audience to observe the relationships between the characters and interpret the action.

When Curtis Hanson interviewed Wyler in 1967 and asked if he was currently working on anything, Wyler replied, “Yes, I'm doing my first musical,
Funny Girl
. After that I will feel like the man who has done everything.”
²³
Wyler was, indeed, one of the few directors who did everything, and one of fewer still who did it all well.
Funny Girl
received eight Academy Award nominations, including for Best Picture—Wyler's thirteenth film nominated in that category. As the co-winner of the Best Actress Oscar— which she shared with Katharine Hepburn and, like Audrey Hepburn, received for her first starring role—Barbra Streisand became the thirteenth actor to win an Academy Award under Wyler's direction.

While working on
Funny Girl
, Wyler had remained involved with
Patton
, particularly in reviewing the script revisions by James Webb. He was pleased with the revised script, which he considered superior to Coppola's first draft, and excited about making a war film told from the perspective of feuding generals. He expressed his enthusiasm in a telegram to Zanuck: “I still believe, as I always have, that we have the makings of a most unusual war story, different from most that have been made. It is war as fought by the commanding generals with a conflict of personalities and differing views on the conduct of war rather than battles in the field. While parts of some battles can't be avoided, I should like to see them kept to a minimum.”
²⁴

The film was supposed to be made with Burt Lancaster as Patton, but when production was delayed a second time, he was forced to drop out. After Rod Steiger and Lee Marvin also passed on it, the role was offered to George C. Scott. Despite the fact that Wyler had fired Scott from
How to Steal a Million
because of his unprofessional behavior, he thought the actor would make an ideal Patton.

However, Wyler's health was in decline—he had stomach ulcers and other problems—and his wife felt that an eight-month shoot in Spain would be too much for him, not to mention the aggravation of having to deal with Scott. Wyler reluctantly pulled out of the project.
Patton
, like
The Sound of Music
, went on to win many accolades, including the Oscar for Best Picture and another for its new director, Franklin J. Schaffner.

Before ending his career, Wyler would make one more film.
The Liberation of L. B. Jones
is a harsh, uncompromising study of racism that was too far ahead of its time and failed at the box office. It was a rare financial disaster for Wyler—all the more surprising because it came after
Funny Girl
, which had been a box-office bonanza. Wyler, however, had long been interested in making a film on the subject of racism. Having touched on it briefly in
The Little Foxes
, he, along with Lillian Hellman, started working in 1942 on the documentary
The Negro Soldier
, which was intended to boost the morale of the troops. The film was never made, in part because Wyler feared the army would not allow him to present the material the way he wanted to.

After the war, he wanted to make a film about a black doctor facing white hatred in the South, but Paramount would not allow it. Talking about the genesis of
L. B. Jones
, Wyler told Axel Madsen: “I had always wanted to do something on the racial issue…and when Ronald Lubin brought me Jesse Hill Ford's novel, it seemed a good story, very powerful, very blunt, in a way a harsh and shocking story. When the author came to us and I asked him, ‘Aren't you putting it on a little thick?' he answered, ‘Not at all, it is all based on facts.'”
²⁵
Shortly after
The Liberation of L. B. Jones
was released, Wyler told
Entertainment World
, “I like films that contribute something to the social consciousness of the times and that is what I tried to do with this picture.”
²⁶

The film rights to the novel had been bought by Ronald Lubin (
The Outrage, Billy Budd
) and screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, who won an Oscar in 1967 for his screenplay of
In the Heat of the Night
—a more commercial, entertaining, and compromised film than this one would be. However, the two were unable to interest a studio in the material until Wyler agreed to direct it. Released from his contract with Fox, Wyler then signed a six-picture deal with Columbia, stipulating that he would produce three films and direct three.
The Liberation of L. B. Jones
would be the first. The film was first titled
The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones
(echoing the novel), but the studio shortened it to prevent any possibility of its being confused with a costume drama about the famous poet. (There is also, perhaps, the ironic echo of LBJ.)

Wyler cast the film primarily with unknowns. Seeking an actor who could project some sympathy into what was essentially an unsympathetic role, he wanted Henry Fonda to play lawyer Oman Hedgepath, the most powerful figure in town. Fonda was interested, but he was unable to fit it into his schedule. Wyler then cast Lee J. Cobb, who was a well-known character actor but hardly a star. The two key roles, L. B. Jones and Willie Joe Worth, went to Roscoe Lee Browne, who had just appeared in
The Comedians
opposite Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and Anthony Zerbe, who had recently debuted in
Cool Hand Luke
starring Paul Newman. Lola Falana was chosen to play Jones's adulterous wife, whose affair ignites the racial tensions in the story; it was her American screen debut, and her sexy image would be prominently displayed in the film's racy ads. Yaphet Kotto, who would later become a television star, was cast as Sonny Boy Mosby, who returns to town to kill a policeman who beat him as a child, while Lee Majors and Barbara Hershey had the nondescript roles of Hedgepath's liberal nephew and his wife.

The film was scheduled for a ten-week shoot. Two weeks were spent on location in and around Humboldt, Tennessee—near where Jesse Hill Ford lived—and the rest of the film was shot at Columbia Studios and other locations around Hollywood. To avoid any racial confrontations while on location in the South, the crew stayed at a Holiday Inn outside of town. Black cast members stayed put at night, although, as Wyler remembered, “There was no place to go anyway.”
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The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones
, published by Atlantic–Little Brown in 1965, established Jesse Hill Ford's reputation as an important American writer. The novel was nominated for a National Book Award, chosen as a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, and regarded as an important literary property. Set in the small Tennessee town of Somerton (based on Humboldt), it explores the consequences of the decision by a prosperous black undertaker, L. B. Jones, to divorce Emma, his much younger wife, on the grounds that she is having an affair with a white policeman. Jones wants a dignified divorce, so he asks the town's leading white lawyer, Oman Hedgepath, to represent him. Jones seriously complicates matters, however, when he insists on naming the policeman, Willie Joe Worth, as her lover. Hedgepath feels compelled to tell Worth of Jones's intentions, and Willie Joe tries to persuade Emma not to contest the divorce. When she refuses, he beats her; when she is still not persuaded, he murders Jones. The case is hushed up by Hedgepath and the mayor because they do not want to involve a police officer in a scandal and because the lawyer has implicated himself by advising Willie Joe to make sure the case never got to court.

The Liberation of L. B. Jones
is the darkest of Wyler's final films, all of which—with the exception of the trifling
How to Steal a Million
—deal with man's propensity for hatred and violence and the uselessness of pacifism or nonviolence as a deterrent. This film also highlights the failure of liberalism, which was Wyler's own political philosophy. Although Steve Mundine, Hedgepath's liberal nephew who comes to town with his new bride to be his uncle's law partner, is central to the thematic development of the novel, he remains a nonpresence in the film. Other than occasionally voicing understated objections to his uncle's actions and once even expressing his disappointment directly, Steve takes no action. At the end, he leaves town, disillusioned yet having accomplished nothing.

What is most remarkable about the film is its consistent refusal to offer its audience any of the hopeful signs Ford presents to his readers. The novel takes place in 1963, against the background of the March on Washington and other civil rights protests, but none of this historical context is mentioned in the film. Also, the film's minimization of the Steve Mundine character is telling. In the novel, both Steve and his wife, Nella, take active steps to intercede in Jones's case, even visiting his home to warn him about the danger he is in. Later, Steve bails out a radical who wanders into town and ends up in jail, along with Benny, who is Jones's best friend. (Hedgepath frees him in the film.) Finally, once he quits his uncle's law practice in disgust and leaves town, Steve joins the NAACP and, at the end of the novel, proclaims, “Never again will I stand aside, defer to age and bigotry. We'll take to the streets.”
²⁸

In the novel, in addition to Steve and his wife being radicalized by their experience in Somerton, Mosby eventually joins the Nation of Islam, as does Emma Jones, who becomes a generous benefactor of the movement after her husband's funeral. In one of the concluding passages of the novel, Oman Hedgepath comments that Willie Joe, who confessed to killing Jones before it was hushed up, was unable to live with his crime—he became a drunk and eventually killed himself by crashing his car into a bridge.

All the standard Hollywood tropes offered in the source novel—the death of the bad guy, the redemption of the man of principle, and the beginnings of redemption for an oppressed people—are eliminated in the film. Little remains there except brutality, cynicism, and hopelessness. Given the time in which the film was made, this bare-bones treatment is more than audacious. In the words of Charles Champlin of the
Los Angeles Times
, “There are no punishments, no deathbed repentances, nothing to suggest that anything has changed or will change tomorrow…. The argument of the movie is that we can only be served by the truth, unpalatable as it may be.”
²⁹

The film does not look like a classic Wyler film. In telling the multiple stories entwined in Ford's plot, Wyler cuts extensively from one narrative to the other, some sequences lasting barely a minute. His signature long takes filmed in mid-distance are used sparingly here, replaced by more medium close-ups and close-ups than usual. Wyler's best films concentrate on character dilemmas played out within a social space. As always, he focuses on how inner imperatives affect the social sphere, but in
The Liberation
, the elimination of this social space signifies a breakdown of any communal cohesion. In the savagely alienated environment of this small southern town, communication is minimal and usually meaningless. Wyler's strength in presenting character in context is tested here because he tends to search with his characters for the consummation of integrated and healthy relationships. In
The Collector
, he explores a dead-end of individuals in isolation. In his final film, he presents a society on the brink of collapse, upended by racial hatred.