The Heiress (1949)

USA, 115 minutes

Director: William Wyler

Writers: Ruth Goetz, Augustus Goetz, Henry James

Photography: Leo Tover

Music: Aaron Copland

Editor: William Hornbeck

Cast: Olivia de Havilland, Ralph Richardson, Montgomery Clift, Miriam Hopkins, Vanessa Brown, Mona Freeman, Ray Collins

The short novel Washington Square by Henry James remains one of my favorites by him, even if James later sniffed at it himself, calling it “poorish.” What a loon! I suspect his problem may have been that the story depends very much on moral wrongs and attendant high emotions, much like the overheated revenge story. Certainly that is the source of the overwhelming and powerful final scenes of the movie version. Washington Square was adapted (with alterations) for a Broadway production in 1947 that cast Basil Rathbone as the smug controlling father and Wendy Hiller as “the girl” (as James describes her). Robert Osborne strolls into a DVD introduction to share some anecdotes about Olivia de Havilland and director William Wyler seeing the stage show and deciding to make a movie of it.

And what a movie! I’ve seen it several times and it only gets better, one of those silvery black-and-white midcentury Hollywood shows that make you glad you love the movies. Note that we are already a couple of removes from James now. The husband-and-wife team of Augustus and Ruth Goetz adapted his tale for the stage and then, with Wyler, for the movies. So no, it does not have the delicate shadings that James prized so highly (and may have found missing in Washington Square). It is instead a blunt and harrowing tale of all love gone between a domineering father who has lost the plot, his timid daughter, and a fortune-hunting cad. These three performances—Ralph Richardson as Dr. Austin Sloper, a wealthy and discriminating surgeon, Olivia de Havilland as his daughter Catherine, and Montgomery Clift as hound dog Morris Townsend—have a lot to do with it.

Jezebel (1938)

USA, 104 minutes

Director: William Wyler

Writers: Clements Ripley, Abem Finkel, John Huston, Owen Davis, Robert Buckner, Louis F. Edelman

Photography: Ernest Haller

Music: Max Steiner

Editor: Warren Low

Cast: Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, George Brent, Donald Crisp, Fay Bainter, Margaret Lindsay, Richard Cromwell, Spring Byington, Matthew "Stymie" Beard, Theresa Harris

Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone With the Wind was published in 1936, became an immediate sensation, and has basically remained so since. I haven't read it myself but it has never been out of print in nearly 100 years. Even so, it was practically overshadowed by the movie version three years later, a sort of massive 1-2 knockout punch only seen in the annals of media culture perhaps once a decade (compare the Beatles owning the Billboard top 5 for one week in 1964 ... the Beatles have also never gone out of print). Word is that Bette Davis was given the lead in Jezebel as compensation for not getting the Scarlett O'Hara role. Indeed, sympathy may have run so deep it accounts for her Best Actress Oscar for this picture too, although Davis was plainly one of the best players of her generation, and well-liked, with 10 nominations and two wins for Best Actress between 1934 and 1944. Jezebel, based on a play that was successful in 1933, similarly goes down South for a good old slavery times story—this one set in 1850s Louisiana during a yellow fever epidemic, with racial tensions of a different kind, abolitionist, as thick in the air as 2020.

Davis is Julie Marsden, a Scarlett-like—and/or Scarlett-lite, depending on your feelings about GWTW—spoiled daughter of wealth. If Scarlett wears black to shock everyone at a dance, Julie wears scarlet. It works out pretty much the same. Julie's on-again off-again beau is Preston Dillard (Henry Fonda, young and on the rise but already with a ramrod up his spine) and the script sends the couple spinning. Julie seems to have a habit of going too far and then seeking atonement and Davis captains up her gyrations with quivering conviction. She's easy to hate in a sort of delicious way. At a key point in the movie, Julie's Aunt Belle says she reminds her "of a woman called Jezebel, who did evil in the sight of God." Jezebel, you may recall, is a biblical Phoenician character, the wife of Ahab and a general no-goodnik infatuated with power, and a woman besides. Aunt Belle is not wrong here but I will say Julie's road to redemption is far more compelling than Scarlett O'Hara's.

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

USA, 170 minutes
Director: William Wyler
Writers: Robert E. Sherwood, MacKinlay Kantor
Photography: Gregg Toland
Music: Hugo Friedhofer
Editor: Daniel Mandell
Cast: Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, Dana Andrews, Virginia Mayo, Harold Russell, Cathy O'Donnell, Hoagy Carmichael, Gladys George, Roman Bohnen, Ray Collins, Ray Teal, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Gene Krupa, Michael Hall

At nearly three hours and with a large and impressive ensemble cast and three or more narrative threads intertwining and going simultaneously, The Best Years of Our Lives is ambitious, setting out to make a monumentally large statement in real time about the fallout and aftereffects of the end of World War II on the American home front. It might be the best American movie about World War II. It's set in a fictional medium-sized city named Boone City, which suggests the near-Midwest or border South region, Kentucky, Ohio, or Tennessee. But really it is Anytown. And the movie starts within months or weeks of the war's end, as three servicemen make their ways home: airman Fred Derry (Dana Andrews, one of the most familiar faces in '40s movies), disabled sailor Homer Parrish (Harold Russell), and middle-aged soldier Al Stephenson (Fredric March).

Not one of them is owner of a neat and tidy life. Fred is in a quickie wartime marriage fast going bad, Homer, whose hands were lost in the war and replaced by hooks, struggles with his disability, and Al is the most confusing character of all. He's a swank banker, a family man married 20 years with two nearly grown children. But he finds his identity more in his status as an army sergeant than in his big comfortable life, which he gave up to fight. He's also an alarming drunk by today's standards, and probably even then—regularly humiliating himself in what often appear to be blackout episodes. It gets even messier when the women are brought in. In short order Fred falls for Al's daughter Peggy (a brilliant Teresa Wright), Homer can't believe his girlfriend Wilma (Cathy O'Donnell) still wants to marry him so he avoids her, leaving her hanging, and Al drinks at every opportunity, maundering about soldierly camaraderie. His long-suffering wife Milly (a perfectly cast Myrna Loy) seems to have faith he will dry out on his own sooner or later. Maybe most amazing, The Best Years of Our Lives is a feel-good movie that actually makes you feel good.

The Big Country (1958)

USA, 165 minutes
Director: William Wyler
Writers: James R. Webb, Sy Bartlett, Robert Wilder, Jessamyn West, Robert Wyler, Donald Hamilton
Photography: Franz Planer
Music: Jerome Moross
Editors: Robert Belcher, John Faure
Cast: Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons, Charlton Heston, Carroll Baker, Burl Ives, Charles Bickford, Alfonso Bedoya, Chuck Connors

The Big Country seems expressly designed to live up to the "big" in its title—a tale of pioneering ranchers in the West, the movie is nearly three hours long, shot on California locations that convincingly enough look like the Great Plains and "Big Sky" country, with a handful of stars and even an Academy Award for one of them (Burl Ives, who is very good). The theme music by Jerome Moross is epic, memorably sounding like Marlboro cigarettes and those "beef, it's what's for dinner" TV commercials. The story revolves around a long-standing dispute between two families that is turning into a depraved blood feud. Into this mess comes a man of strength and peace.

That's Gregory Peck, as James McKay, come West to marry his college sweetheart, Pat Terrill (Carroll Baker). McKay is actually much more than he appears to be, representing a certain ideal of unpretentious masculinity also seen in John Wayne's performance in The Quiet Man, or later from Peck again in To Kill a Mockingbird. These men abhor displays of dominance as exhibitionistic and unseemly. They have the strength of their self-awareness and don't need to prove things unnecessarily. This confuses people with bullying temperaments, which is approximately where we arrive at what I like best about The Big Country. Pat's family, the Terrills, and the clan they war with, the Hannasseys, tend to see McKay as an Eastern dude, a coward and embarrassment, a troublesome annoyance they have to mind and keep out of scrapes. They don't think he understands "reality." But it's Gregory Peck, folks. You know who's going to end up schooling who here.