The Instant Expert's Guide to William Wyler

The films celebrate their 125th anniversary in 2020 and there's no better place to become better acquainted with the great names in screen history than Cinema Paradiso. If you're not sure where to start, let our Instant Expert series guide you through some of the best films ever made, as it fills you in on a film-maker's background before highlighting 10 of their finest achievements. Starting the new decade is William Wyler, one of the many exiled Europeans who left an indelible mark on American culture during the Golden Age of Hollywood.

In the eyes of many, William Wyler is the pick of the many distinguished directors to have plied their trade in Hollywood during its Golden Age. He guided performers to a record-breaking 36 Oscar nominations, with 14 taking home statuettes for pictures that always had an innovative visual style to match their dramatic intensity. No wonder the biggest stars in American cinema queued up to work with him. But Wyler wasn't the easiest of collaborators, as he tested the patience of performers, producers and technical crews alike with perfectionism that prompted him to demand repeated takes until he was satisfied.

Nothing Wrong With a Bit of Nepotism

When Willi Wyler was born in Mülhausen on 1 July 1902, it was part of the German Empire. By the time the Great War ended, it was in French hands and had been renamed Mulhouse. The son of a Swiss haberdasher, Wyler had been spared conscription, but he had been a wild child who was expelled from several schools. However, his mother (who was the niece of acclaimed German novelist Berthold Auerbach) ensured that Willi and his brother Robert developed a taste for the arts by taking them on regular trips to the theatre and the opera.

Wyler also became fond of films, with Louis Feuillade's Fantômas (1913) and the slapstick shorts of Charlie Chaplin being among his favourites. He would later live next door to Chaplin, but seemed destined for a career in gentleman's outfitting after his father, Leopold, found him a position in Paris. Detesting life behind the counter, Wyler frequently absented himself and tried to secure a place as a violinist at the Conservatory. Instead, his mother, Melanie, asked cousin Carl Laemmle to give her son a job at his film company in New York and Wyler crossed the Atlantic in 1921 to join Universal Studios.

After two years of menial tasks, Wyler convinced Laemmle to summon him to Hollywood, where he spent the next few months learning a variety of trades. Among the pictures he worked on was Wallace Worsley's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), which starred the peerless Lon Chaney and helped forge Universal's link with horror. Ever the rebel, Wyler managed to get himself fired when he was caught in a pool hall when he was supposed to be on the set. Luckily, MGM needed experienced assistant directors to wrangle the extras for Fred Niblo's Ben-Hur (1925) and Wyler did such a good job that he was not only re-hired by Universal, but also entrusted with his first assignment as a director.

Between 1925 and 1928, the newly named William Wyler directed 27 sagebrushers. The majority of those produced for the 'Mustang' series were filmed in three days on a budget of $2000. But the 'Blue Streak' entries allowed him a little more latitude and Wyler impressed the front office sufficiently to direct Bessie Love in the silent comedy, Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly? (1928). When Universal made the transition to sound, Wyler helmed the part-talkies, The Shakedown and The Love Trap, before making his full talking picture bow with Hell's Heroes (all 1929), a loose adaptation of the Peter B. Kyne novel that John Ford would film as 3 Godfathers in 1948. Unfortunately, none of Wyler's later Universal outings are available on disc.

But Wyler was unhappy at Universal, as he kept being saddled with routine assignments and denied the opportunity to tackle more challenging fare. He freelanced at Fox on the lacklustre comedy, The Gay Deception (1935), before announcing his decision to quit his cousin's studio in order to work for an independent producer, Samuel Goldwyn.

The Goldwyn Years

Although he mangled the English language and had a fiery temper, Sam Goldwyn had an eye for talent and a keen appreciation of public tastes. In partnership with brother-in-law Jesse Lasky, the Warsaw-born glove salesman had been one of the founding fathers of Hollywood. But, since his company had been subsumed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1924, he had operated as an independent through United Artists. In many ways, Goldwyn was taking a chance on Wyler, who was widely regarded as a journeyman who had made the most of his family ties. However, he soon came to demonstrate his worth.

He began promisingly with These Three (1936), an adaptation of a controversial Lillian Hellman play that Wyler would revisit as The Children's Hour in 1961. Miriam Hopkins and Merle Oberon played the teachers whose friendship is threatened by vengeful pupil Bonita Granville. But the Production Code prevented Wyler from exploring the lesbian subtext that he was able to reintroduce in the remake, which starred Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine. Infidelity was also the theme of Dodsworth (1936), an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's novel about marriage, motor cars and middle-class mores that earned Wyler his first Oscar nomination. Indeed, the story of Walter Huston and Ruth Chatterton's complex domestic arrangements drew seven citations in all, including one for Best Picture.

Wyler ended an eventful 1936 by replacing Howard Hawks on Goldwyn's interpretation of Edna Ferber's bestseller, Come and Get It. Sadly, it's not available on disc, but Cinema Paradiso users can enjoy Dead End (1937), a gritty reworking of a Sidney Kingsley play that landed another Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Set in New York's Lower East Side, the action centres on Tommy Halop's gang of street urchins and sister Sylvia Sidney's determination to prevent them from following the example of neighbourhood tough Humphrey Bogart.

Working with cinematographer Gregg Toland, Wyler refined his technique of shooting in long takes with a depth of field that placed the viewer at the heart of the action. Yet, while this tactic would prove pivotal to the mise-en-scène style that would drive the new waves in postwar Europe, Wyler was never considered an auteur by the influential critics at Cahiers du Cinéma because he never wrote his own screenplays and accepted too many jobbing assignments instead of developing his own directorial signature.

Wyler claimed to be unconcerned by his omission from the auteur pantheon, but there is a visual consistency to his work, as well as a unifying emotional truth. This is clear in the three films he made with Bette Davis, who went from being a distinctive star to a great actress in Jezebel (1938), The Letter (1940) and The Little Foxes (1941). The first earned her a second Academy Award, while the other two brought further nominations for Best Actress. Wyler also received recognition for The Letter, a moodily intense adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's 1929 play about adulterous passion and callous murder on a Malaysian rubber plantation.

In between his collaborations with Davis - with whom he had a three-year affair, despite being married to actress Margaret Tallichet - Wyler attracted further Best Director recognition for Wuthering Heights (1939), an atmospheric rendering of Emily Brontë's moorland masterpiece that brought Laurence Olivier the first of his nine nominations for Best Actor. He didn't get off to the best of starts with '40 Take Wyler', however, and made a fool of himself when he declared that the puny medium of cinema wasn't big enough to contain his acting talent. Rather than punish the outburst, however, Wyler coaxed Olivier into toning down his performance and the pair became such firm friends that Olivier asked Wyler to direct him in Henry V (1945).

While he was uncomfortable with Shakespeare, Wyler was more than at home on the range, as he proved with The Westerner (1940), a fine vehicle for Gary Cooper, whose Cole Harden tries to prevent a range war in 1880s Texas, while also trying to placate hanging judge Roy Bean (Walter Brennan) and make the acquaintance of famed English actress Lily Langtry (Lillian Bond). Brennan won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, which completed an unprecedented hat-trick after taking the same award for the aforementioned Come and Get It and David Butler's Kentucky (1938).

As war engulfed Europe, Wyler became eager to do his bit, even though the Production Code forbade overt propaganda because the United States remained neutral until 7 December 1941. Accepting an invitation from MGM, Wyler started work on Mrs Miniver, an adaptation of a novel by Jan Struther that had been based on a newspaper column about a housewife's experience of the conflict with Adolf Hitler. Pairing Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon for the second of their eight films together, Wyler sought to alert American audiences to the fact that the war impacted upon everybody in Britain on a daily basis and that the Home Front needed defending every bit as much as the frontline. He later admitted that his vision lacked rigorous authenticity, but the picture won six Oscars (including Best Director) and topped the US box-office charts at the end of 1942.

Following Pearl Harbor, Wyler volunteered for the United States Army Air Forces. He was given the rank of major and ordered to make films to show the folks back home what their boys were doing overseas. In addition to making an uncredited contribution to Edward Steichen's The Fighting Lady (1944), Wyler also directed The Memphis Belle (1944) and Thunderbolt (1947). Chronicling the last two missions of a B-17 Flying Fortress, the former was Wyler's first film in Technicolor.

Having emerged unscathed from the first documentary, Wyler lost the hearing in one ear after an explosion during the filming of Thunderbolt, which focused on a P-47 fighter-bomber operating in the Mediterranean. However, he felt that the injury qualified him to direct The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which attempted to explore the issues facing war veterans returning to normal life after active service. Indeed, Wyler was proud to receive his second Oscar alongside Harold Russell, who lost both hands in a TNT explosion and became the first person to win two Academy Awards for the same role, as he added an honorary Oscar to his Best Supporting Actor win. Moreover, he became the first non-professional to win an acting award, a feat that has only subsequently been matched by Haing S. Ngor for Roland Joffé's The Killing Fields (1984).

At the Peak of His Powers

Despite touching the nation's soul with his first postwar picture, Wyler wasn't sure he could continue directing after his experiences in the combat zone. As his relationship with Sam Goldwyn had broken down, he was essentially unemployed when he joined Frank Capra and George Stevens in forming Liberty Films to control his own output. Yet he never made a movie for his own company, despite finding it difficult to persuade the studios to finance the weighty projects he had in mind.

Eventually, Paramount agreed to bankroll an adaptation of Henry James's Washington Square and The Heiress (1949) earned Wyler another Oscar nomination for Best Director. It was also listed for Best Picture and brought Olivia De Havilland her second Best Actress prize. Encouraged to stay at the studio, Wyler opted for a change of tack and starred Kirk Douglas in Detective Story (1951), a busily absorbing film noir that was adapted from a Sidney Kingsley play by Philip Yordan and Wyler's brother, Robert. In addition to another Best Director nod, the picture also drew a Best Actress citation for Eleanor Parker as Douglas's unhappy spouse and a Best Supporting nomination for Lee Grant as a New York shoplifter.

Although he had demonstrated that he could handle a problem picture with insight and restraint, Wyler felt the call of literature again, as he reunited with Laurence Olivier on Carrie (1952). Adapted from a turn-of-the-century novel by Theodore Dreiser, the story took small-town girl Carrie Meeber (Jennifer Jones) to Chicago, where she wins the heart of salesman Charles Drouet (Eddie Albert) and restaurant manager, George Hurstwood (Olivier). The production proved troubled, as Wyler was mourning the death of his one year-old son and he was dismayed to discover that Jones had withheld the fact that she was pregnant. Nursing a leg injury, Olivier took against Jones and made little attempt to hide his disdain for her lack of technique. Yet, this is perhaps Wyler's most underrated picture and is long overdue rediscovery.

There can't be many film fans who don't know Wyler's next picture, as Roman Holiday (1953) made a star of Audrey Hepburn. Recognising her talent, Gregory Peck insisted on the unknown Belgian sharing top billing and his generosity paid off, as Hepburn won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Returning to Europe to direct a feature for the first time, Wyler was also nominated for his briskly evocative depiction of the Eternal City and the role it plays in the whirlwind romance between a runaway princess and an American journalist seeking a career-making scoop.

Having revelled in Rome's landmarks, Wyler largely confined the action to the home of an Indianapolis family taken hostage by a trio of fugitives in The Desperate Hours (1955). For once, Wyler was overlooked by the Academy. But he was nominated for Best Director and Best Picture for Friendly Persuasion (1956), a Gary Cooper drama about a Quaker family coming to terms with the aftermath of the US Civil War that is not currently available on disc. This adaptation of Jessamyn West's novel afforded Wyler the opportunity to make his first colour feature and he returned to the great outdoors for The Big Country (1958), which reunited him with Gregory Peck and introduced him to Charlton Heston, who would go on to take the title role in Ben-Hur (1959).

Both pictures confirmed Wyler's mastery of widescreen composition, with Franz Planer's views of the sprawling frontier landscape dwarfing the cattle-rearing characters engaged in a feud over water access and Robert Surtees capturing the majesty of the 300 sets constructed at Cinecittà in Rome to house MGM's make-or-break remake of Lew Wallace's 1880 novel about a Judean prince's trials and tribulations in the capital of the Ancient World. However, these mammoth enterprises took their toll on Wyler and he only revisited his past with The Children's Hour before he turned down the chance to direct The Sound of Music (1965) in order to tackle John Fowles's contentious novel, The Collector (1965).

Kenneth More found himself surplus to requirements when the studio ordered Wyler to trim his three-hour drama and his scenes as the boyfriend of the woman kidnapped by an obsessive amateur entomologist were cut. Natalie Wood and Sarah Miles were considered for the part played by Samantha Eggar, while Terence Stamp was preferred to Anthony Perkins and Dean Stockwell because Wyler had discovered that he had harboured a crush on Eggar while they were at drama school. The gambit paid off, as the duo took the acting honours at Cannes, while Wyler snagged the last of his Oscar nominations.

But critics proved as divided over this sinister tale as they were over How to Steal a Million (1966), a Swinging Sixties caper that saw Audrey Hepburn cajole thief Peter O'Toole into stealing a Cellini statue from the Kléber-Lafayette Museum in Paris in order to prevent insurance experts from discovering that it's a fake that had been sculpted by her father, Hugh Griffith. If this sometimes felt like Wyler had signed on to reunite with Hepburn in another photogenic European capital, few would care, as it's a pleasingly polished piece of undemanding entertainment.

Wyler's artistry is more readily evident in Funny Girl (1968), an adaptation of a hit Broadway show about the life of stage Fanny Brice that introduced singer Barbra Streisand to cinema audiences. The debutant tied for Best Actress with Katharine Hepburn in Anthony Harvey's The Lion in Winter. But it proved to be Wyler's penultimate picture, as he slipped into retirement following the little-seen and undervalued adaptation of Jesse Hill Ford's fact-based novel, The Liberation of L.B. Jones (1970), which stars Roscoe Lee Browne as the black funeral director who is victimised by Anthony Zerbe, a Tennessee cop who has been having an affair with Browne's young wife, Lola Falana.