The Films of William Wyler: "Wuthering Heights" on TCM Sunday

Not for DeHavilland's winning performance?

 

That, too, I suppose.

 

2:00pm [Romance] Wuthering Heights (1939)

A married noblewoman fights her lifelong attraction to a charismatic gypsy.
Cast: Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier, David Niven, Flora Robson Dir: William Wyler BW-104 mins, TV-PG [Close Captioned] [Email Remind Me]

Terribly dated, and Olivier chews the scenery as if it tastes like ambrosia.

 

Yeah, Olivier's terrible in this one.

 

I must say, I'm shocked and chagrined at the the amount of anti-Olivier vitriol on this board. Mortified and stupefied!

Naturally, I think the film's terrific. Two scenes in particular - when Heathcliff Mk. II arrives, and when Cathy's cactus. Extraordinary photography from Gregg Toland.

The only things that really bugged me were David Niven's lack of a 'tache, and the fact that old Olivier looks like Cosmo Kramer. It butchers the novel, sure, but that's pretty stock-standard for the times.

 

Even Olivier himself said the only thing that held up was Geraldine Fitzgerald's performance.

 

Come on, Olivier is far too mannered to be cast as the feral Heathcliff. It doesn't particularly bother me that they cut a good twenty years or so out of the movie; the book is far too long for any real film treatment. But Olivier just doesn't tap into anything approximating the basic animal nature of Heathcliff.

I tend to dislike Olivier in a lot of things, it's true, mainly Richard III, which he's dreadful in. But he's absolutely perfect in Spartacus, his best performance, and plenty capable in Marathon Man. His Hamlet is a problem because it feels so truncated (it is), but no one would put out a four hour movie in the 1940s, as Branagh was able to in the 90s, so it's not entirely his fault. It's not entirely the problem that Olivier was a bad actor as that he seemed to keep getting miscast: like Wuthering Heights, in which he might have been fine in the Niven part, but couldn't carry Heathcliff's energy. Olivier himself seemed to fundamentally misunderstand what he was good at; he cast himself as Othello - missed opportunity! He'd have been staggeringly great as Iago, I bet; and it's the better part too!

 

While I agree that a more animalistic Heathcliff is what's desired, it's the fact that he's outright possessed by his love for Cathy that he sells beautifully, and within Wyler's handling of the material, that is what works.

But I don't subscribe to the theory that he's terrible in Richard III at all - the interpretation of Richard as a ludicrous, stroppy, overgrown child demonstrates a pretty thorough understanding of Shakespeare's complete portrayal of that character over the Henry VI cycle, rather than being just limited to how he's presented in Richard III alone. Olivier also seems to get the comedy of the play, which no one else really does. And Olivier had already played Iago before doing Othello - he wanted the greater challenge at that point in his career, which required him to actually deepen his vocal range - something that not many actors would commit themselves too.

To say nothing of his turn as Henry V, which was so iconic that when a statue of Henry himself was damaged during World War II, it was restored with Olivier's visage instead.

 

Heathcliff may be an uncastable role. Timothy Dalton wasn't right, either. According to the prof in my University English class, Heathcliff is the personification of the id for females (or sometime like that). A tall order. Hitchcock wanted a Heathcliff-like actor for the groom/lover of Mrs. Paradine in "The Paradine Case"--"with horny hands like the Devil!"--was the way he put it. He wanted Robert Newton; Selznick overruled him and cast the ultra-refined Louis Jourdan.

Olivier is a chilly actor in general, though I rather agree with you on him taking a crack at Iago. That would have been interesting.

I remember enjoying "Love Among the Ruins" in which he and Katherine Hepburn were surprisingly rather good together. Been awhile, though.

No attempt at the Scottish play. I know he did it to great acclaim on the stage...I wonder why not?

 

He was planning to do Macbeth after Richard III, but there was a perfect storm of problems that prevented it from ever happening...

The first was that he had unwisely allowed Richard III to premiere on American television at the same time that it was released in cinemas, for a substantial up-front deal that was the biggest in television history at that point. Or something. But what that meant was that the cinema release bombed hard. And while it had done well in the UK (and earned back its money, IIRC), that was just bad medicine.

Secondly, Alexander Korda was going to finance it, but he died.

Thirdly, Olivier managed to get Mike Todd interested, and it was probably going to ahead then, but... he died too.

It really is a shame, since it was meant to be Olivier's crowning achievement on the stage. He was planning to have Vivien Leigh reprise her role as Lady Macbeth, and was going to use his stock company of Scots, like John Laurie and... those other guys. The idea was to shoot it in Scotland, and give it a really "bloody atmosphere" or something vague like that. But after The Prince and the Showgirl, Olivier was turned off directing altogether, and so it never came to be.

 

I think I would agree that the problems with Heathcliff run a lot deeper than not casting Olivier could possibly fix. I'm not the biggest fan of Wuthering Heights really; it's all just notched a bit too high. I'm not sure any of the characters really work, in the final analysis.

I want to see Olivier's Lear; the clips I've seen make me think that I'll be revising my opinion on Olivier's best performance once I see it. I don't know how he'd work as Macbeth; but Leigh as Lady Macbeth? Now that would have been a true 'unleash hell' thing to see. I will say that tragic as Mike Todd's death was for everyone who knew him, at least it kept him from 'producing' Macbeth. God, can you picture Michael Todd's version of Macbeth? Oy.

Some of my problems with Richard III also run to his direction. He keeps the audience at an almost constant remove from the characters; I think he was specifically trying to ape a real stage production and rejecting the more immersive world he created in Hamlet. But it doesn't really work. I mean Gielgud is reduced to flopping about like a fish on the dock during his dream speech, which should be one of the absolute high points of the first third of the play and instead it plays like some sort of comedic outtake, a total absurdity. And Olivier doesn't allow any energy to break out. I mean, the climax is just sort of horses ambling about. When you can take away all energy and compunction from the "My kingdom for a horse" moment, you've really done something wrong. This was probably all intentional, as you say his playing of Richard as a petulant, spoiled child was. That doesn't make it any easier to sit through. Perhaps the childish thing is truer to the characterization of Richard over the arc, but it doesn't make him a compelling or a frightening villain in the play at hand.

 

This is off-topic, but I'll just chuck out a few more words in defense of Olivier's Dicky 3, since it's one of my top... 5 or so favourite films.

Ostensibly the direction is laid back and stagey, sure, but it's not a simple embalming of the stage production that, say, Stuart Burge's Othello is. It's actually highly cinematic - Olivier engages the audience very directly by talking directly to the camera, an intimacy of sorts that can't really be replicated on the stage, unless you're the only person in the audience. Moreover, Olivier treats the camera (and by extension the audience) as another member of the court - and at the start, the only one he trusts. And to do this that means that there's no heavily stylized shots like Hamlet or Henry V. There are fewer cuts, and the use of close-up is used sparingly.

And it's not just something that's done for kicks - Olivier uses the voyeuristic nature of film to add layers to the play - Richard's always watching someone, or something, but then the viewer is always watching Richard, and is given greater context for it, allowing them to see him as absurd, or an *******, or whatever. Clarence's speech is a good example - it's feeble and all done in master shots, which seems odd at first, but then we get that shot at the end with Richard's silhouette framing the window on the door - so we've been seeing the whole thing through his eyes - a contemptuous look at Clarence, essentially. And then eventually, Richard begins to turn away from the audience, towards Buckingham, so he serves as the confidant - Richard doesn't speak to the audience again until Buckingham starts to turn, which all adds to the idea of the audience being a member of the court.

Of course, the idea of immersiveness might run counter to the sparse set design, which I'll admit is probably too limited, but then I don't think you can do a full, lavish recreation of the period for it to work. Shakespeare requires a different cinematic approach to most material - you can't do the grand, M-G-M style production, or else you end up with crap like Dieterle's A Midsummer Night's Dream or Cukor's Romeo and Juliet - films that don't work at all, because they're more about sets and costumes than they are Shakespeare. It's no coincidence that Olivier was the first person to make Shakespeare work on the screen, and he did so by eschewing a totally realistic setting, instead placing the Henry V story in the Globe theatre, which gives way to the "landscape of imagination." He also knew to use familiar cinematic touchstones to help sell the material - Eisenstein in his case. In Branagh's, Kurosawa.

Richard III also features one of the more interesting blendings of director and star that I've seen - Olivier directs from inside the film, offering the camera a guiding hand, or opening the door for it or, as mentioned before, letting it follow his eyeline. Or as he talks about his bloody plot, we see weapons of war on the wall behind him, until the image of a suspended crown lines right up with him saying "crown." Stuff like that works, since Richard is essentially the "director" of the play, shuffling everything into place until he becomes king. And then the style changes again - Richard's back to talking to the audience, but the camera is pulling away from him gradually. It's visual storytelling, and so I think it rises well above being a filmed play.

As for Olivier's performance, I think he's just about as insidious as you can get, but he's also having fun with it. He takes such delight in having duped Edward that he can hardly contain himself when he has to play the sympathetic brother with Clarence. The look he gives the young Duke of York after the crack about his shoulder is absolutely terrifying, one of the few times I find Otto Heller's lighting to be impressive. Then there's the little moments - the look he tranfixes a page with when his crown is dropped, the disdainful little whack he gives Stanley after they've shafted Hastings, raising his hand in false piety

 

"Richard III" is a pot-boiler, though, and it can't really be anything else given the time in which it was written. The Tudors seized the throne on the basis that Richard was a monster. Reality was different and more interesting...Richard was a rather decent, upright man who made one bad decision (not murder of his nephews, but usurpation of the throne) and the horrors that ensue from it (including committing murder of two children, and his own death). Given what Shakespeare wrote, Olivier gives a rather broad performance, which would be better if he directed the film as a film, instead of as a play, which is terribly off-putting. He's not alone in this problem (see also: Peter Brooks' "The Beggar's Opera" and a number of Hollywood adaptations of stage musicals.)

I do agree with Rogue's opinion that Olivier was often cast against his strengths, or directed by people who did not know how to properly use him. This, alas, included himself. He *looked* like a male lead, but had trouble producing the necessary personal magnetism, and preferred disguises and makeup.

Re: "MacBeth". I suppose Vivien Leigh was necessary to get financing, but while Olivier got glowing notices for his stage MacBeth, she got fierce personal attacks for her Lady MacBeth, including a really nasty one from Kenneth Tynan. She wasn't good on the stage, but in fact, she was better than Olivier on the screen, where her light voice didn't matter so much, and her charisma really registered.

 

I was always struck by the fact that this most British of stories was filmed (at least the exteriors) in the Los Angeles suburb of Chatsworth. The Moors of Chatsworth. Romantic.

 

That's a good defense of Richard III. My jaw literally dropped at your statement that it's one of your personal top 5. I had such a bad reaction to it that it's impossible for me to even think of it as being anyone's favorite film or even one of their favorites. But you mount a good defense. And I dislike kicking people's favorites, so no more from me.

In this thread. Today, at least.

 

I wouldn't worry too much. I don't think I know anyone else who would call it a favourite. I mention it to people and, well, 90% of them aren't familiar with the film, and the 10% that are just raise their eyebrow and ask "Really?" So I'm used to it. Even Olivier panned it as he got old, and was glad that someone had hacked out a few scenes.