1/22/23
Newsletter #227
The Crack of Dawn
I missed a golden nugget of irony yesterday. The kindly, lovable Marcus Loew died in 1927 at the age of 57. The reviled, detested Adolph Zukor died in 1976 at the age of 103.
Another interesting aspect of William Wyler’s life and career was his experiences during WWII and immediately thereafter. When the war broke out, Wyler joined the Air Force, and he was assigned to the photographic unit. Wyler decided that it would make an interesting story to follow one B-17 “Flying Fortress” flight crew through a series of missions. He ended up on a B-17 called the Memphis Belle. Wyler photographed the film himself in color. During one mission the aircraft received so much anti-aircraft fire that it blew out Wyler’s eardrums.
That was the end of the war for Wyler and he was shipped home. The film he made, Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress, was released in 1944 and won the Oscar for Best Documentary.
When William Wyler got out of the hospital he was three-quarters deaf and certain that his career was over. Wyler’s first film after the war was The Best Years of Our Lives (Best Picture, 1946). The first day on the set he confided his problem to the sound man who said, “Why don’t I just give you your own set of headphones, then you can hear what’s coming through the microphone.” Wyler got headphones and the system worked perfectly. So perfectly, in fact, that since that time all directors wear headphones on the set.
As might be expected, I love The Best Years of Our Lives. I think it’s one of the best movies ever made. Oddly, it’s based on a book-length poem called Glory to Me by McKinley Cantor. In the poem the character of Homer is “spastic,” meaning seizures caused by “shell shock,” which became “battle fatigue,” and is now “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).” Wyler rejected that idea. He remembered a training film he’d seen in the military starring a young paratrooper, Harold Russell, who had lost both of his arms in a grenade explosion. Wyler cast Russell as Homer – one of the most mature decisions made in moviemaking up until then – and Harold Russell won two Oscars for the part: Best Supporting Actor and an honorary Oscar for “bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans.”
As nothing more than a silly note, my buddy Jack, a New Yorker, pointed out to me about 40 years ago, that Harold Russell was from Boston. The whole movie takes place in Boonesville, a fictious town that looks suspiciously like Los Angeles. Everybody in the cast has a flat, midwestern accent, except Harold Russell who has a thick Boston accent. He says, “These hooks are amazing, I can even drive a cah.”
And since I’m just waxing rhapsodically, I will confess that I’ve always been in love with young Theresa Wright. I think she’s so good and so cute I could die. Her angry, crooked pout drives me nuts. Anyway, in the movie she decides that she wants Dana Andrews, except that he’s married to a tramp (the wonderful trampy Virginia Mayo). When she confides in her parents, Fredric March and Myrna Loy, and they say, but he’s married, Theresa Wright says, “”Yeah? Well I’m going to break that marriage up,” I think movies just broke a giant taboo. Tramps break up good marriages; nice girls don’t break up marriages to tramps.
Theresa Wright had a truly brilliant career for exactly five years, and that was it. When it was over, it was over.
Theresa Wright was discovered by none other than William Wyler. He cast her in The Little Foxes (1941) with Bette Davis, and Wright was nominated for an Oscar. Wyler cast her in her second film, Mrs. Miniver (Best Picture, 1942), and Theresa Wright won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. In her third film, Pride of the Yankees (1942), she played the wife of Lou Gehrig (Gary Cooper), and was nominated for Best Actress. In 1943 Theresa Wright is terrific in the lead of Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. In 1946 was The Best Years of Our Lives, and that was the end. Her career was over. She continued to work until 1959, but she never got a good part again.
The best movie she was in during that later period was The Actress (1953), a film that I happen to love. It’s based on the autobiography of Ruth Gordon (who won her own Oscar in 1968 for Rosemary’s Baby), and is about growing up in Boston in the early 1900s. The story is about a mother, a father, and their daughter who outrageously wants to be an actress, which in Boston at that time is akin to being a prostitute. Her father is played by Spencer Tracy, a retired seaman whose prize possession is an old telescope, and he couldn’t be more against young Ruth becoming an actress. Ruth Gordon is strangely played by Jean Simmons, whom I adore, except that she was beautiful and British, and Ruth Gordon was neither of those. But what I found really disconcerting was that Theresa Wright played her mother. Theresa Wright was only eleven years older than Jean Simmons and nowhere near old enough for the part. She does fine, as does Jean Simmons, but Spencer Tracy steals the show.
Spoiler alert: the end of that movie is so simple and so powerful that it always makes me tear up with happiness, and so now I’m going to give it away. All young Ruth wants to do in life is to go to NYC, stay in a proper boarding house for young women (it’s 1919), and try to make it as an actress on Broadway. Except that they don’t have any money. So, her father who is completely against her doing this, pawns his prized telescope to finance her dream. And there, it got me again.
Have a fine day.