Ups and Downs of the Rollercoaster, Part 1

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If there were such thing as a Dictionary of Stereotypical Characters, the entry for “eccentric inventor” would have a picture of Fred Waller. In the 1920s and ’30s, Waller’s day job was at Paramount’s East Coast studios in Astoria, Long Island, where he worked as a photographic jack of all trades. In one capacity or another he worked on, among other pictures, Male and Female (1921) for Cecil B. DeMille, and That Royle Girl (’25) and The Sorrows of Satan (’26) for D. W. Griffith. In the ’30s he produced and directed a series of innovative and visually striking jazz-flavored shorts featuring the likes of Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington and Fats Waller.

Meanwhile, on his own time, he tinkered and puttered. He invented a container for keeping food dry in humid climates, a remote-recording wind direction-and-velocity indicator, an adjustable sail batten for sailboats, and a still camera that could take a 360-degree panoramic picture. (Also, as I mentioned before, water skis, which he marketed as Dolphin Awkwa-Skees.) Through it all he continued his obsession with finding a way to photograph the full range of human vision, pursuing his idea that peripheral vision was as important to depth perception as binocular vision. He used to walk around his home wearing a baseball cap with toothpicks stuck in the brim, testing how far back he could place the toothpicks and still see them, mulling over the kind of screen he would need for what he had in mind.

In 1938, architect Ralph Walker came to Waller with a unique photography challenge connected with an exhibit Walker was designing for the petroleum industry for the upcoming New York World’s Fair. Walker envisioned a spherical room with a battery of projectors casting a constant stream of moving pictures, an idea that dovetailed neatly with what Waller had been turning over in his own head. With Walker’s firm, Waller formed the Vitarama Corporation, and by early 1939 he had a working model of eleven 16mm projectors showing a patchwork image on a concave quarter-dome screen suspended over the heads of the audience.

In the end Walker’s clients, the representatives of the petroleum industry, decided not to use Waller’s Vitarama, opting for something simpler, more conventional — and, not incidentally, cheaper to produce and exhibit. Waller adapted the Vitarama idea for another exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair, a huge mosaic slide show of still images for the Eastman Kodak exhibit. More important, the idea of the concave screen had solved Waller’s dilemma over how to project his multi-part images to envelop an audience.

Waller and Walker obtained the backing of Laurance Rockefeller, scion of one of the world’s wealthiest families, to continue developing the Vitarama process, and an experimental lab was set up in the old Rockefeller carriage stables in Manhattan, where a number of invited guests saw demonstrations of the cumbersome process. The outbreak of World War II in Europe effectively back-burnered any plans to exhibit Vitarama theatrically, but one of those invited guests, a friend of Waller’s, was an admiral in the U.S. Navy specializing in ballistics, and he approached Waller with the idea of using Vitarama in training aerial gunners — looking forward to the time (which virtually everyone knew was coming) when the U.S. would be drawn into the war. 
 
With a massive influx of military money (Waller later estimated it at over $5 million), the Waller Flexible Gunnery Trainer was born. It simplified the Vitarama design, using five 35mm projectors to display the same size image as the eleven 16mm ones, and it enabled Waller to work out the technical challenges involved in both the process itself and the manufacture of the equipment. Eventually 75 trainers, each occupying an area of some 27,000 cubic feet, were set up all over the U.S., in Hawaii, and in England, where over a million men were trained; the Air Force estimated that more than 250,000 casualties were averted thanks to this training.
 
After the war Waller returned to developing Vitarama for theatrical use. The Cinerama Corporation (it’s not clear exactly where the idea for the name came from) was formed in 1947, with the backing of Laurance Rockefeller, publisher Henry Luce of Time Inc., and other venture capitalists who were prominent in East Coast circles. 
 

Also coming aboard at this time was Hazard E. “Buz” Reeves, one of the most brilliant and inventive men in the history of sound recording. Reeves had seen Vitarama as early as 1940, and was excited at the prospect of developing a sound system to go with it. Reeves and his company, Reeves Soundcraft, pioneered the use of magnetic recording for movies, a method more versatile than the standard practice of optical sound recording.

As Waller simplified the Vitarama/Cinerama process from five projectors to three, and from the quarter-dome screen to a wide curved rectangle (like the inner surface of a slightly flattened cylinder), Reeves developed a sound system to match: five huge loudspeakers behind the screen, each with its own discrete track, and a sixth track dispersed as needed to speakers placed at the rear and sides of the auditorium. (A seventh track, a composite of the other six, was intended only as an emergency backup and seldom used in practice.) Naturally, seven separate magnetic soundtracks required far more space than a standard optical soundtrack, so the sound was recorded on its own strip of 35mm film and run on a separate “projector” synchronized with the three image projectors just as they were synchronized with one another.

Standard 35mm sound film runs at a rate of 24 frames per second, 90 feet per minute. Cinerama ran at 26 frames per second, with each frame half-again as high, which worked out to 146.3 feet per minute. The soundtrack(s) ran at the same speed, or 29.25 inches per second, nearly twice the rate of broadcast-quality tape machines of the day. This allowed Reeves’s microphones to record a far wider dynamic range, 30 to 15,000 cycles per second (cps), as compared to the standard 125 to 7,000 cps of the day. Reeves and Waller could thus record and reproduce sound with a range and fidelity that, while commonplace enough to us in this digital age, were simply astounding to ears of the late 1940s. 
 
Also in 1947, Waller moved his base of operations to an unused indoor tennis court on an estate in Oyster Bay, Long Island, where he and Reeves set up an experimental lab and the first Cinerama screening room. By the spring of 1949, they had the entire process — camera, projectors, screen, sound system, and demonstration reels — ready to show to further prospective investors. Through the rest of the year, they invited a parade of movie industry figures — theater executives, studio heads, producers, writers, technicians — out to Oyster Bay to see what they had. 
 
The results and reactions were gratifying — up to a point. As Buz Reeves later remembered, there was “a terrifying inertia to their enthusiasm”. It was too cumbersome, too expensive, too complicated, too impractical, yadda yadda yadda. Everybody thanked Waller and Reeves for the show, but passed on the idea of doing anything with it (or about it) themselves. 
 
In May 1950 a demonstration screening for the press attracted little attention and less publicity. Laurance Rockefeller and Henry Luce decided Cinerama was going nowhere, so they withdrew, selling their interest in the process to Reeves for a paltry $1,500. The Cinerama Corporation was dissolved (though Vitarama Corp. continued to hold all the relevant patents). But Waller and Reeves didn’t lose heart; Reeves was literally putting his money where his microphones were. And indeed, all was not lost; Cinerama’s twin angels were just around the corner. 
 

To be continued…

(PLEASE NOTE: For much of the information in this and following posts, I am indebted to the work of Dr. Thomas E. Erffmeyer, who wrote a history of Cinerama as his Ph.D. dissertation in Radio, Television and Film at Northwestern University [June 1985].)

 

The Shout Heard Round the World

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It was Merian C. Cooper who came up with the perfect way to introduce Cinerama to audiences. To do it he took a cue from his alter ego Carl Denham in his most famous picture, King Kong, and the way Denham introduced the giant ape to New York.  

Spectators at that first showing on September 30, 1952 walked into an auditorium dominated by a huge curved wall of wine-red curtains. As the house lights dimmed, they heard the Morse Code dit-dit-ditting that was familiar to them all as the intro to Lowell Thomas’s daily radio program. The red curtains parted slightly, and there was the image of Thomas himself, in black and white, on a standard-size movie screen, welcoming them.

Thomas promised the audience “the latest development in the magic of light and sound.” Then for a full 13 minutes Thomas reviewed the history of moving pictures, from The Great Train Robbery down to 1952. Finally: “The pictures you are now going to see have no plot. They have no stars. This is not a stageplay, nor is it a feature picture, nor a travelogue, nor a symphonic concert, nor an opera. But it is a combination of all of them. In fact, it is the first public demonstration of an entirely new medium. Ladies and gentlemen…This…is Cinerama!”

The curtains rolled open — rolled and rolled and rolled — to the sound of a thundering fanfare that might have accompanied a triumphant army’s march into Ancient Rome, augmented by gasps and squeals from the flabbergasted audience. The screen dissolved from that ordinary little black-and-white image of Lowell Thomas…

 

 

…to THIS:  

 

…and that Broadway Theatre audience was taken on an uninterrupted ride in the front seat of the Atom Smasher Rollercoaster at Rockaway, Long Island’s Playland amusement park. “No human being had ever sat in a theater and had this kind of visceral experience,” recalled production manager Jim Morrison. “It hit you right in the gut, right smack in the belly.” And historian Kevin Brownlow: “There was nothing to beat that moment… Suddenly the cinema seemed to open out…the back wall seemed to disappear and we were plunging on a rollercoaster. It was the most staggering moment one could possibly have.”

 
My own father’s reaction was more succinct. My uncle took him, my mother and my grandparents to see This Is Cinerama when it opened at San Francisco’s Orpheum Theatre on Christmas Day 1953. As the curtains opened and the rollercoaster burst into view, my father reared back in his seat, his eyes bulging from their sockets, and bellowed at the top of his lungs: “Jeeee-zuss Christ!!” He may have been more vociferous than anyone else that day, but every single person in the Orpheum had exactly the same reaction. I know because when my own turn to see This Is Cinerama came 11 years later — even after a decade of CinemaScope, Todd-AO, Panavision, VistaVision, and all the other scopes and visions Cinerama had inspired — that Great Unveiling had lost none of its power. No two ways about it, this was — and remains — the greatest knockout punch in the history of motion pictures.
 
That first showing had been a mighty near-run thing. The entire feature had never once been run through the projectors — not until the first audience saw it on opening night. With three projectors running in interlocked unison, the standard practice of switching reels every 12 or 13 minutes was clearly out of the question. Special reels, nearly three feet in diameter, had to be built so that each half of the feature could be run without interruption, the only reel change coming during intermission. Two days before the premiere it was discovered that Act II was too long even for those; the film overran the reels by several hundred feet. With no time to make more reels, everybody cringed, rolled their eyes, took a deep breath and decided to hope for the best. They made it almost all the way home — but during the closing credits, the film finally slopped off the take-up reels and jammed the projectors.
 
Nevertheless, by that time the screening had created such a sensation that those lost last few seconds counted only as a tiny bump in the road to glory. “It was the biggest night I’ve ever seen in pictures,” Merian C. Cooper remembered. “People stayed on the sidewalk by the hundreds till four or five in the morning talking about it. And I knew we had revolutionized the picture business.”
 
Actually, This Is Cinerama wasn’t really a movie at all; it was an early example of something there wouldn’t even be a term for until decades later: virtual reality. It filled your entire field of vision, 146 degrees left to right, 55 degrees top to bottom (each frame was half again as high as ordinary film, spanning six sprocket holes instead of the standard four). It projected at 26 frames per second instead of 24, lessening the flicker that is always perceived (if only subliminally) by the human eye, and brightening and sharpening the image perceptibly. The sounds didn’t sound recorded at all, and they came from wherever on the screen the images making them were located; musical passages seemed to come from an enormous, invisible orchestra and choir all around you. The postcard image above, an artist’s rendering of the Atom Smasher ride, and the photo on this souvenir program of a theater patron gazing with delight at the bathing beauties water-skiing all around him, are in fact accurate depictions of how audiences perceived the Cinerama experience.
 
Still, Cooper was right. He and Lowell Thomas and (especially) Fred Waller had revolutionized the picture business. All those Hollywood moguls who had trekked out to Waller’s workshop in Oyster Bay, Long Island, marveling at his demonstration reels but declining to buy into his process, now found themselves scrambling to come up with some variation on Cinerama for themselves. Darryl Zanuck’s 20th Century Fox was first out of the gate in September 1953 with The Robe in CinemaScope (“the poor man’s Cinerama”). Other processes followed, all of them more visually impressive than standard 35mm but none with the sense of audience envelopment Cinerama conveyed; Waller’s process remained the gold standard.
 
Cinerama entered the culture and the language. There were pop tunes about it (“Oh wide-screen mama/Don’t you Cinerama me…”). The very name Cinerama — a portmanteau word blending “cinema” and “panorama” — influenced American English in ways that haven’t entirely disappeared even now. Everything, it seemed, had its “rama”: laundromats called themselves Launderama; florists had Flowerama; fast-food joints became Burgerama; car dealers became Autorama or Motorama; Kelvinator came out with a Foodarama refrigerator; and, inevitably, burlesque stripper Mavis Rodgers billed herself as “the Sinerama Girl”.
 
Fred Waller and Hazard Reeves received special Academy Awards at the 1953 ceremony in March 1954, Waller “for designing and developing the multiple photographic and projection systems which culminated in Cinerama”, Reeves for developing “a process of applying stripes of magnetic oxide to motion picture film for sound recording and reproduction.” Two months later, almost to the day, while This Is Cinerama was still playing to sold-out houses at the Broadway Theatre, Fred Waller died of a heart attack at 67. It may seem tragic, to be taken away at the height of his fame after the vindication of his long struggle to bring Cinerama to the public. In fact, however, it was the act of a Merciful Providence. For Waller was spared the heartache of seeing what would become of his brainchild in only ten short years. 
 

But more of that next time…  

 

Cinerama-Rama!

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I had hoped to be able to go into more depth with this post, but events have overtaken me, so I have to write it pretty much off the top of my head and get it up as soon as possible.

It’s been, oh, 25 or 30 years now since a teenage cousin of mine heard me mention Cinerama and asked me what it was. I was astonished, back then, that there was someone who didn’t know. Well, that cousin is now 46, with a Ph.D. and a position in the Microbiology Dept. at the Univeristy of California Irvine. How many have been born since then who also don’t know what Cinerama was?

In a nutshell, and for the benefit of those who don’t know, Cinerama was the first successful widescreen process. Hollywood had flirted with widescreen photography in the late 1920s and early ’30s, but it proved to be an innovation too far for an industry already grappling with the transition to sound and the Great Depression, and the experiment quickly petered out in failure. 

By the early ’50s things had changed — and besides, Cinerama was as different from those early pictures in Grandeur and Magnascope as FM radio was from AM. The screen wasn’t just wide, it was vast, curved 146 degrees to match almost the full range of human vision, using three synchronized projectors to display an image nearly five times the size of even the largest theater screen. And Cinerama had a multi-channel high-fidelity sound system for which a new term was coined: “stereophonic sound”.
 
Cinerama’s reign was brief, just a little over a decade, but it was the wonder of the age while it lasted. It was the brainchild of Fred Waller, an engineer, photographic researcher, special effects technician and director of short subjects at Paramount’s East Coast studio at Astoria, Long Island (he also invented water skis, believe it or not). Waller’s inspirational insight was the understanding that peripheral vision is what enables the eye to perceive depth, and he became obsessed with the idea of duplicating the entire range of human vision. Eventually, in 1939, he developed what he called Vitarama, an incredibly complicated system of 11 interlocking projectors in three rows of four, five and two, casting a single image on the inside of a hemispherical screen. In 1940, as it became increasingly clear that America would be entering World War II sooner or later, Waller contracted with the military to modify Vitarama (cutting the number of projectors from 11 to five) into the Waller Flexible Gunnery Trainer, an early version of a flight simulator (or video game) for training airplane gunners in aerial combat.

 

After the war, Waller continued to fine-tune the process, streamlining the projectors from five to three, replacing the hemispherical screen with a wide, curved rectangle, and partnering with sound technician Hazard Reeves to develop that multi-track sound system. But Waller was unable to interest anyone in what he now called Cinerama until it came to the attention of Lowell Thomas, the famous radio commentator, adventurer, lecturer and journalist who had first made his name covering T.E. Lawrence’s campaigns in Arabia during World War I (Thomas made Lawrence’s name, too). Thomas enlisted the services of producer Merian C. Cooper. Long story short, the result of Waller’s know-how and Thomas and Cooper’s enthusiasm and showmanship opened at New York’s Broadway Theatre on September 30, 1952. That first Cinerama production, which opened as simply Cinerama and eventually came to be known as This Is Cinerama, is (not to mince words) one of the most important and influential movies ever made — after all, today, it is a rare and cheap movie indeed that isn’t produced in wide screen and stereo.
 
This coming September 30 will mark the 60th anniversary of Cinerama‘s premiere, and the occasion is not going unobserved. ArcLight Cinemas, which owns the Pacific Cinerama Dome in Hollywood (one of only three theaters in the world equipped to show true Cinerama) will be spending a week, from September 28 to October 4, presenting — to borrow the title of the second Cinerama production — a Cinerama Holiday. Every single Cinerama picture produced during the years Cinerama reigned as the Metropolitan Opera of movies will be on display, along with a couple of ringers — Cinerama’s Russian Adventure, an Americanized release of a picture produced by the Soviets in 1958 with pirated equipment and called Kinopanorama (then, typically of the time, the Russians accused us of stealing it from them); and Windjammer: The Voyage of the Christian Radich (1958), produced in a competing but compatible process called Cinemiracle — plus two movies that bore the Cinerama name even though they weren’t: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (’64) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (’68).

 

Not all the screenings will be in “classic” Cinerama. Two of the early travelogues (This Is Cinerama and Search for Paradise [’57]) and the two “story” productions (The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and How the West Was Won, both ’62) will be screened in their original three-strip (i.e., three-projector) form, albeit with digital sound reproduction to replace the original console that played Reeves’s seven-track magnetic sound strip. Mad, Mad World will be shown in Ultra Panavision, the 70mm process that supplanted (but could never replace) Cinerama after How the West Was Won. The others will all be digital presentations, most of them remastered from original negatives.

I’m not sure what to expect from those digital prints, but I’m willing take a chance. In any case, the trip down to Hollywood will be worth it to see This Is Cinerama and How the West Was Won again, and Search for Paradise and Brothers Grimm for the first time. If you can possibly make it to Hollywood, you’ll find it worth the trip too. Click here for details and to purchase tickets (at this writing, only the first screening of each title is available for purchase; later screenings will no doubt be along in time).

I’ll have more to say about Cinerama, but I want to get this post up as quickly as possible. Tickets have only been on sale since Thursday, and they’re already going fast.

To be continued…
  

A Hitch in the Get-Along: State Secret

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This post is my contribution to The Best Hitchcock
Films Hitchcock Never Made, a blogathon hosted
by my Classic Movie Blog Association buddies
Dorian at Tales of the Easily Distracted and Becky
at ClassicBecky’s Brain Food. For other posts in
this most excellent assortment of essays,
click on the blogathon link above.

For my part…well, once again I’ve done
my best to come up with a little gem
you never heard of.

Here goes…

 

 

*                    *                    *

 

 
I’ve chosen Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat’s State Secret. If you’re a real Hitchcock buff, Launder and Gilliat’s names will give you an instant link with the Master. But before I get to that, there are a couple of erroneous points I need to clear up.
 

First and foremost, the title of this 1950 British thriller is definitely not The Great Manhunt, and it never was. Ever. Anywhere it played. You don’t know that if you go only by its page on the IMDb or Clive Hirschhorn’s The Columbia Story; both sources give The Great Manhunt as State Secret‘s U.S. release title. But film collector Eric Spilker assures us — and Eric never opens his mouth unless he knows what he’s talking about — that the picture opened in the U.S. as State Secret and played that way everywhere, even when it turned up on TV. Evidently Columbia made some early press releases announcing it as The Great Manhunt (a title they also announced, then discarded, for 1949’s The Doolins of Oklahoma), then thought better of it. In any case, the lobby card I’ve reproduced here says “Columbia Pictures presents”, showing clearly that it’s from the U.S. release, so there you have it. (The IMDb listing is particularly puzzling, since their standard policy is to list a movie under its title in its country of origin, but in this case it’s the other way round, giving the [erroneous] U.S. title first.) (And to add to the confusion there’s this at iOffer.com, i-offering the DVD as The Great Manhunt; I suspect they may have simply picked up the error from Clive Hirschhorn or the IMDb.) 

Also on the IMDb is the claim that the picture was based on a novel by Roy Huggins, the writer who later went on to create, produce and/or write for the TV series Maverick, The Virginian, The Fugitive, and The Rockford Files, among others. I have no idea where that notion came from; there’s no mention of Huggins in State Secret‘s screen credits, or in Variety’s review. In 2001, when the picture was screened at Cinevent in Columbus, OH, the program notes went even further, saying that the source was Huggins’s novel Appointment with Fear. In fact, Appointment with Fear was a noir novelette by Huggins that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on September 28, 1946, about an L.A. private eye embroiled in a murder case in Tucson, AZ. And by the way, as if these waters weren’t already muddy enough, the IMDb claims that Appointment with Fear was the basis for another 1950 movie, a Jack Carson farce called The Good Humor Man; I haven’t seen that picture, but the idea is marginally more credible, since (like Huggins’s story) The Good Humor Man appears to concern a man investigating a murder in which he’s the chief suspect. But I digress.
 
So, getting back to State Secret. It was never The Great Manhunt, and Roy Huggins had nothing to do with it. Now shall we proceed?
 

SPOILER ALERT: Before getting into the picture itself, here’s fair warning: Since State Secret is not officially available for home viewing — it is, however, available from iOffer.com at the link above, and also here from Loving the Classics — I’m going to go ahead and summarize the entire plot, including the ending. If you don’t want to tag along that far, never fear; there’ll be another warning before you get to anything you don’t want to read. (And for your information, the frame-caps illustrating this post are from Loving the Classics’ version of the DVD, so if you’re thinking you might like to buy it you’ll have an idea what you’d get from them.)

Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat (sometimes spelled Gilliatt) had a partnership that spanned some 36 years and 37 pictures — from Seven Sinners (U.S.: Doomed Cargo) in 1936 to Ooh…You Are Awful! (U.S.: Get Charlie Tully) in 1972. Both men were equally adept at writing, producing and directing, and they mixed and matched duties as the situation required. As I said before, Hitchcock buffs will probably recognize them as co-authors of the screenplay (from Ethel Lina White’s novel) for The Lady Vanishes, one of Hitchcock’s best British pictures. (Personally, I’d say it’s the best; I find The 39 Steps just a teensy-weensy bit overrated, and I think Launder and Gilliat’s script makes the difference.) Gilliat also worked with Hitchcock on Jamaica Inn (1939), and he and Launder wrote Night Train to Munich, a Hitchcockian thriller directed by Carol Reed in 1940.

Launder gets an authorial credit here, on the movie’s title card, but in fact it’s the only time his name appears in the credits; the picture was written and directed by Gilliat on his own. No doubt there was some collaboration between the partners, but Launder was more comfortable with comedies like Lady Godiva Rides Again (U.S.: Bikini Baby) and The Belles of St. Trinian’s. In any event, the team’s Hitchcockian pedigree was unassailable, and it served Gilliat well here.  

 
State Secret opens with an almost whimsical title: “You won’t find the State of Vosnia on any map, nor can you buy a dictionary of the language in any bookshop. Still — let’s face it — Vosnia exists: and any resemblance it may have to any other State, past or present, living or dead, is hardly coincidental.” As the name “Vosnia” suggests, the real-life version of this non-coincidental resemblance is Yugoslavia and its dictator-president-for-life Marshal Josip Broz Tito. Vosnia’s head of state is General Niva (Walter Rilla), whom we first see on the balcony of the People’s Palace in the capital city of Strelna, where he is expected to announce his campaign for re-election as prime minister (he is, oddly enough, running unopposed) before a carefully-orchestrated display of spontaneous public adoration. General Niva’s police state is a tightly-run personality cult; Niva’s picture is everywhere (George Orwell’s Big Brother — to say nothing of real-life characters like Tito, Peron and Stalin — was prominent in everyone’s mind when State Secret went into production). Half the orphanages, hospitals and highways in Vosnia are named for General Niva; when his face appears in the cinema newsreels or his name is mentioned in public, no one wants to risk being the last to join in the applause.
 
 
Meanwhile, at an undisclosed location some distance
from Strelna — in time we will learn just how far — two men
are listening to a radio broadcast of the crowd wildly cheering
and hailing General Niva. One is Dr. John Marlowe (Douglas
Fairbanks Jr.), an American surgeon who at the moment
looks rather the worse for wear. His appearance contrasts
sharply with the other man in the room, the crisply
uniformed, almost dapper Colonel Galcon (Jack Hawkins).
Marlowe has just finished tending to a bedridden woman
in the next room. “It will serve very little purpose,”
Galcon says; “however, I said that I would not
refuse any reasonable request.”
 
 
 
Smoking one last cigarette, Marlowe drifts to the
window, where he sees the hillside posted with a
daunting number of guards. Galcon assures him
that the view is the same on the other side. “Shot
while escaping, eh?” asks Marlowe. “No no,” says
Galcon, “a shooting accident. We have to think of
the newspapers.” Evidently resigned, Marlowe
nevertheless says that he still believes the truth
will come out. Galcon asks why. Marlowe thinks,
Why indeed?, and his mind turns back to when
this all began. When was it? Only two weeks ago?
 
 
As the screen ripples into flashback, we learn more about Dr. Marlowe. He has been on a four-month busman’s holiday in London, where he has been demonstrating a revolutionary new surgical technique he developed for the treatment of “portal hypertension”, a hitherto untreatable condition. (Portal hypertension is a real malady, having to do with high pressure in the blood vessels serving the liver. Medical details don’t matter; this is just the maguffin to get Marlowe to London and later Vosnia.)
 
In a 3-minute subjective-camera sequence that Hitchcock would surely have approved, we see through Marlowe’s eyes a letter from the International Congress of Science in Vosnia announcing an award to him for his surgical breakthrough…
 
 
 
 
 
…a steward at his London club announcing that “a
gentleman…a foreigner, sir, didn’t quite catch
his name” is waiting to see him…
 
 
 
 
  …and a Vosnian diplomat there to congratulate
Marlowe on his award, and to invite him to
Strelna to receive the award and to demonstrate
his surgical technique. As the first American
recipient of this award, Marlowe’s presence
in Strelna would be a remarkable gesture
of international understanding. 
 
 
Despite the stated misgivings of some
of his more conservative colleagues,
Marlowe accepts the invitation out of a
spirit of international friendship (mixed,
perhaps, with just a trace of vanity), and
before long he’s on a plane for Strelna.
(Here we get a hint suggesting
approximately when State Secret takes
place — or at least when it was shot:
The magazine in Marlowe’s hands is the
November 12, 1949 issue of The New
Yorker.)
 
 
 
 In Strelna Marlowe is wined, dined and feted,
and finally honored at a formal ceremony where
he receives his award from Colonel Galcon, the
urbane and affable Vosnian Minister of Public
Services. As Marlowe learns, that’s not the
only government hat Galcon wears; indeed, he
seems to be General Niva’s right-hand man,
with more official portfolios than Poo-Bah
in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado.
 
 
 
 
 
The next day Marlowe meets and examines the patient on whom he is to perform his operation. The man is a nondescript-looking Eastern European peasant-type — a farmer, perhaps, or laborer. Through an interpreter, Marlowe reassures the man, then scrubs up for the surgery. 
 
But once the operation is well underway, in fact nearly completed —
 
 
 
Marlowe suddenly notices that others in the operating party — his colleague Dr. Revo (Karel Stepanek), the nurse, the anaesthetist — keep glancing nervously at one of the anonymous white-clad figures standing around the table. Looking more closely and scouring his memory, at last it comes to him, and Marlowe is astonished to find himself gazing into the hawk-like eyes of the versatile Col. Galcon.
 
Why does this supreme government functionary care about the fate of a little Vosnian nobody? His suspicions aroused, Marlowe demands to see the concealed face of the patient — and once again, heightening Marlowe’s worry, everyone looks to Galcon for permission. Galcon nods curtly, and Marlowe at last learns that he is operating not on the man he examined that morning…
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
…but on General Niva himself!
 
Containing his anger, Marlowe turns again to his operation and completes the procedure. In the next room, however, Marlowe rages at this gross breach of medical ethics. Galcon is unctuously apologetic. Such a pity that Marlowe recognized the patient; if he hadn’t, he’d be on his way to the airport now, none the wiser. As it is, he simply can’t be allowed to leave…not just yet. Galcon says that at this delicate moment in Vosnian and international politics, no word of Gen. Niva’s illness can be allowed to leak out. Marlowe is in the midst of demanding an immediate car to the airport when the room suddenly reels and all goes black.
Marlowe awakens with “a slight concussion” which Galcon tells him he suffered in “a fall”. The stooge Dr. Revo has prescribed rest, and Marlowe is to aid Revo in monitoring Gen. Niva’s recovery. “I hate insisting when we are so much in your debt,” Galcon says, but “we can save newsprint, which is in short supply, by announcing the General’s illness, his recovery, and your departure at one and the same time.” 
 
In the days that follow, after wiring Marlowe’s London colleagues that the doctor will be staying on in Strelna for several days, Galcon proves to be the most charming and hospitable of captors. One night over billiards Marlowe asks what Galcon would have done if Niva had died on the operating table. If we cannot afford to announce his illness, Galcon replies, how much less could we have acknowledged his death. They couldn’t have let Marlowe go, nor could they have kept him indefinitely. “It would be very difficult to see more than one solution.”
 
 
 
On the very morning that Marlowe is finally to leave for London, the situation he and Galcon discussed over billiards becomes more than hypothetical: Gen. Niva suffers a pulmonary embolism and dies. As Galcon stands in shock over the body of his dead leader, Marlowe gathers his wits and bolts for the airport with his unsuspecting driver. 
 
Galcon soon follows in hot pursuit, but when he catches up with the car Marlowe is gone…
 
 
 
 
 
 Frame22a-Streetcar
 
 
 
 
…having taken advantage of a stop at a streetcar crossing to transfer from one conveyance to the other.
 
Arriving in Strelna and unable to speak the language, Marlowe goes straight to a public telephone arcade and steps into a booth. He asks haltingly for the American legation, and when a voice at the legation answers in English, Marlowe asks to speak with someone in authority. But the instant he gives his name the line goes dead. Switching to another booth and about to try the call again, Marlowe sees that in those few seconds, a cadre of police have arrived and seized the man who stepped into the first booth after Marlowe vacated it. Obviously, a second phone call to the American legation is not such a hot idea.
 
As the poor man jabbers his innocence, Marlowe slips out of the arcade and seeks refuge in a barber shop. Hanging his coat on the wall, he takes a seat in one barber’s chair and undergoes a shave to avoid attracting attention. As he leaves, he picks up somebody else’s coat, but before he can return it the barber helps him into the coat, the wrong one, and Marlowe acquiesces rather than do anything the barber might remember later.
 
Marlowe lucks across an English-speaking cab driver who takes him to the American legation, but a street disturbance is going on there; the police are involved, and Marlowe barely escapes being shot as he flees down an alley. We later learn from an English-language radio broadcast that a riot (obviously — to us, at least — staged) broke out that afternoon in front of both the American and British legations. The Vosnian State Police have duly placed guards in front of both offices to ensure that law and order are maintained — and, of course, to intercept Marlowe.
 
 
 
 
 
Furtively wandering the streets as sound trucks patrol with announcements that include the word “Amerikani”, and wanted posters with his picture begin appearing everywhere, Marlowe joins a crowd filing into a vaudeville theater (after a close call when a policeman detains another man who slightly resembles Marlowe’s picture). As he slouches in his seat wondering what to do next…
 
 
 
 
…he is amazed to hear an English voice coming from the stage, singing the old Mills Brothers song “Paper Doll”. It’s clear that the lead singer is bilingual — she slips easily from Vosnian to English and back again in the number — and the card on the easel by the proscenium identifies the act as “Sisters Robinson”.
 
As Marlowe mulls this, he sees the policeman he barely eluded outside stalking the aisles of the theater. Meanwhile the next act, an escape artist, has evidently called for volunteers from the audience, and when a number of men file backstage Marlowe joins them. 
 

 

Sneaking upstairs, he finds a party going on in one of the dressing rooms. He also finds the English singer, Lisa Robinson (Glynis Johns). “You are English, aren’t you?” “Fifty percent,” she says. “We don’t see many Americans in Strelna. What are you doing here?” “Running from the police.” Stunned, Lisa flies into a hissing-whisper panic. “Do you think I’m mad? I can’t help you! Get out of here!”

Downstairs, that cop is showing Marlowe’s picture around to the vaudevillians backstage. Marlowe sidles out the stage door and muscles his way into a car with Lisa and several of her friends — none of whom, fortunately, can understand their conversation. Marlowe’s obvious desperation and Lisa’s essential decency overcome her fear, and she smuggles him into her room at her boarding house, while the other two girls in her act leer. Lisa allows Marlowe to sleep on her sofa (“What will your sisters think?” “They’re not my sisters and they have nothing to think with.”), but he will have to be on his way in the morning.

When Marlowe wakes next morning, Lisa has a gun on him and addresses him in Vosnian. In English, she tells him to stop pretending not to understand: She knows that his name is Karl Theodor, he’s a smuggler of foreign currency, and he’s flying to London tonight. Lisa went through Marlowe’s jacket while he slept — the wrong one, that is, the one he picked up in the barber shop — and found “his” ID card, plane ticket, and 5,000 U.S. dollars. Marlowe tries to explain but she doesn’t believe him.
 
But then one of Lisa’s neighbors spots Marlowe in her room and recognizes him from the picture the cop showed him last night. Lisa overhears the neighbor calling the police and realizes Marlowe really is the American they’re looking for, so the two of them abscond out the back door. Hiding in a movie theater, he finally whispers the whole story to her. Now that she’s been linked with Marlowe, they’re both as good as dead if Marlowe is caught. Unable to reach the American or British legations, their only hope is somehow to get out of the country. And their only lead is the man Theodor, who was about to leave for London.
 
Since the purloined jacket contains Theodor’s keys as well as his address, the two are able to let themselves in to his apartment. When Theodor (Herbert Lom) comes home, he is alarmed, but actually relieved when he learns they’re “only” there to blackmail him; at least they’re not from the police, what with possessing foreign currency being a hanging offense in Vosnia. 
 
But Theodor isn’t flying to London tonight, and neither is anybody else. All planes have been grounded, and Theodor recognizes Marlowe as a wanted man, although he doesn’t know why. So, taking a gamble, Marlowe tells him about Niva’s death. Horrified, Theodor realizes that he’s as dead as Marlowe and Lisa if the two don’t get out of the country, so he has no choice but to help them — and to foot the bill for any bribes that will need to be paid. Grumbling all the way, he smuggles them in the dead of night onto a friend’s lake barge. They are to disembark in the town of Bilin on the opposite shore and take the tramway up the mountain to a man named Sigrist, who will escort them over the mountains to the frontier. “Next time I have my hair cut,” Theodor mutters, “I’ll make a point of keeping on my jacket.”
 
 
 
 
By now Lisa is wanted too, and her picture is as widespread as Marlowe’s. On the tramway, the two even spot her on the front page of a newspaper the motorman is reading.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
They position themselves to hide the picture from other passengers, and they chat up the motorman to keep him from turning the page. They try to find a way to swipe the paper when he’s not looking, but it’s no use…
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
…and the motorman finally sees the picture on his return trip downhill. The slow downward trip buys Marlowe and Lisa a little time…
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 

…but the motorman wastes no time reporting the sighting to police when he finally gets back to the station.

 

 

 
 
Sigrist, a hardy mountaineer who asks no questions and answers none (“You want to get out, we’re being paid to take you.”), leads Marlowe and Lisa over the treacherous mountains (“The easy ways are always guarded.”). But the motorman’s warning has galvanized Vosnia’s ever-efficient state police; Col. Galcon himself is on his way to spearhead the search, and soldiers have begun swarming the passes.
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
One of them spots Sigrist in the lead and shoots him off the mountain; only a snapping rope saves Marlowe and Lisa from following Sigrist’s body down the rocky cliff.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
Lisa momentarily panics, but Marlowe urges her to pull herself together, and she does. They continue inching their way along the narrow ledge…
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
…only to come face to face with the soldier who shot Sigrist. In a brief, desperate struggle, Marlowe overcomes the soldier and (with Lisa as interpreter) orders him to lead them to the frontier.
 
Finally they come to an outcrop overlooking a small cluster of buildings below. That’s the frontier, the soldier tells them. Marlowe knocks the soldier out, and he and Lisa run down the hill toward freedom.

 

But they are not at the frontier; the soldier has led them into a trap. They try to flee, but Lisa is shot, and both of them are captured.
 
The screen ripples, and we are reminded of what we’ve forgotten in all the excitement: This has all been a flashback. Now we end as we began, with the harried and bedraggled Dr. John Marlowe helpless in the clutches of the suavely implacable Col. Galcon, as they listen on the radio to the “spontaneous” demonstration of adoration for General Niva. But now we know that the Niva we saw on the balcony at the beginning of the picture wasn’t Niva at all; he was already dead by then. The man on the balcony, Galcon admits, is a double, a stand-in for the General until the results of the forthcoming (rigged) election can give the government a mandate for “extreme security measures”. We also know who the bedridden woman in the next room is. Marlowe has saved Lisa’s life — but, as Galcon says, to little purpose; both of them are only minutes away from being murdered on Galcon’s orders.
 
Let’s leave it at that for now, shall we? State Secret is a tight, nifty little thriller that gives Douglas Fairbanks Jr. one of his best roles ever — certainly his best since Rupert of Hentzau in The Prisoner of Zenda (’37). And it deploys elements that Hitchcock had made his own. The everyman, fish-out-of-water hero — a noted surgeon in this case, perhaps, but certainly ill-equipped for such desperate cloak-and-dagger stuff. The skeptical and reluctant bystander dragooned into helping the hero who moves from hostility to sympathy and winds up just as deep in the soup as he is. The urbane, even charming villain who in other circumstances would be a delightful companion for an evening of chess, cigars and fine brandy. 
 

Jack Hawkins and Glynis Johns shine here, of course
(didn’t they always, and doesn’t Glynis still?), but the
one whom Variety aptly dubbed the “picture stealer”
is Herbert Lom as Karl Theodor, a slippery, weasely
little black-marketeer reminiscent of Peter Lorre at
his most Ugarte-esque. Lom steals the picture all
right, something he did more than once (check him
out sometime as Napoleon in King Vidor’s War and
Peace; he steals that one too). I’m delighted to
report that Lom, who was born Herbert Charles
Angelo Kuchacevich von Schluderpacheru in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire during World War I,
is still with us, and will turn 95 on September 11.
Continued long life to him, and to Glynis Johns,
also still with us.

Making State Secret entailed another challenge that surely would have piqued Alfred Hitchcock’s interest. Fully a quarter — maybe even a third — of the picture is spoken (or, in the vaudeville scenes, sung) in “Vosnian”, a language that doesn’t exist and was concocted for Sidney Gilliat by one Georgina Shield (“language advisor” in the credits). The sound of Vosnian is vaguely Slavic, vaguely Russian, and vaguely German — sometimes by turns, sometimes all at once. There are no subtitles in the movie — meaning that whenever the actors speak Vosnian, they are saying things no one on Earth except Georgina Shield could possibly understand. Yet there are two salient points to be made here: (1) while the exact words are largely unknown, it is always crystal clear what the characters are saying; and (2) every actor in the picture, from Jack Hawkins and Glynis Johns all the way down to the barber who gives John Marlowe his shave, seems absolutely to be speaking his or her native tongue. It’s a remarkable touch that reflects well on both director and actors — and one that, in the overall suspense and pace of the picture, is liable to go unnoticed.

Oh, and one final note: In Sweden, State Secret played under the title Hemlig Operation, which translates to Covert Operation. What a clever title that is, even in English!

*                    *                    *

Epilogue: Spoiler-phobes read no farther

 
 
Marlowe trudges away from his last meeting with Galcon, being led to the spot where his “shooting accident” will be carefully staged. He hears — no doubt believing it will be the last thing he hears — the sound on Galcon’s radio of the crowd outside the People’s Palace in Strelna, wildly cheering and chanting “Ni-va! Ni-va! Ni-va!”
 
Suddenly there’s a gunshot, then four more in rapid succession. Marlowe flinches, but the shots weren’t from the guards facing him — they came from the radio. The cheering and chanting from the crowd changes to screams and pandemonium. Then the radio goes dead.
 
Marlowe runs back to the door of the cottage. Galcon is already on the phone to Strelna, barking questions in Vosnian. He blanches. General Niva — or rather, “General Niva” — has been shot. Killed instantly. In full view of 50,000 of his subjects.
 
 
What now? asks Marlowe. Who knows? says Galcon. “At the moment I don’t know whether I’m a crypto-fascist, a liberal humanitarian, or a simple deviationist. Depends whether I still control tomorrow’s newspapers.”
 
Oh yes, Galcon still has to deal with Marlowe and Lisa. He orders a stretcher party to escort the two of them to the frontier, where there’s an excellent hospital for Lisa on the other side. Yes, they’re free to go. What can either of them say? Only that a dead man is dead.
 
At the door Galcon turns and delivers what must surely be one of the unsung great exit speeches. “Please don’t think that I am being in any way whimsical, but if you should happen to hear of a vacant chair for political science — anywhere — try to get in touch with me.” “That may be a little difficult,” says Marlowe. Galcon smiles. “It may be difficult, but I would appreciate the effort.” And he is gone.
 
 
 
 
 
Later, on their long-deferred flight to London, Lisa — now almost fully recovered from her wound — lays down the law to Marlowe. The only reason she is accepting his help is that he really does owe her something. Once she is on her feet, they will part. They have absolutely nothing in common. It would be humiliating for her and disastrous for him. Marlowe nods and agrees with everything she says. She eyes him suspiciously. You don’t mean a word you say, she accuses him. No, Marlowe admits, he doesn’t. 
 
But it’s all right. Neither does she.

Wyler’s Legacy (reprinted)

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July 1 will mark the 110th anniversary of the birth of William Wyler (1902-81), peerless movie director par excellence. The occasion is being observed by a blogathon hosted by The Movie Projector June 24 – 29, in which many of my fellow members in the Classic Movie Blog Association (CMBA) will be holding forth on their favorite Wyler pictures. Go here for a list of blogathon participants and links to their individual posts as they go up.

For my part, in conjunction with The Movie Projector’s blogathon, I’ve been republishing, one a day, a series of five posts I did on Wyler in 2010, and this is the last one, a summation of the previous four. The blogathon runs one  more day, so be sure to check it out. Meanwhile, Happy Birthday, Willy, and thanks for the memories!
 
  

 *                    *                    *

When I mentioned to a friend that I was planning a post on William Wyler (which has now turned into several), he said, “Good. I’ll be interested to see what you consider his…” — he searched for the right word — “…apotheosis.”

To tell the truth, at that point I hadn’t given much thought to apotheosizing the man, though I guess that’s what I’ve done. The dictionary gives two definitions of apotheosis: (1) the elevation of someone to the status of a god; and (2) the epitome or quintessence. So since my friend brought it up, what is, or was, the apotheosis of William Wyler? Now that I’ve elevated him to somewhere in the vicinity of godhood, what should we consider the epitome and quintessence of his work?

 To answer that, we might as well start by taking a look at Wyler’s three Oscar-winning best pictures. Ben-Hur is the easiest to dismiss; in fact, it’s the hardest one not to. Check out this poster from 1959: The Entertainment Experience of a Lifetime. At the time, despite the exclamation point, that seemed a simple statement of fact, and it’s hard at this remove to explain the impact of Ben-Hur to anyone who wasn’t there. Star Wars wasn’t a patch on it, though its mystique has outlasted Ben-Hur‘s. Star Wars was the movie of the year in 1977, the way Titanic was in 1997. But in 1959 and ’60, Ben-Hur was a movie for all time; the few dissenting voices were swamped in the ballyhoo.
 
Check out Wyler’s billing on the poster, too — bigger than anything but the title. Certainly bigger than author Lew Wallace way up there in the fine print, but bigger too than even the stars or producer Sam Zimbalist (whom the stress of the project sent to an early grave). There’s an apotheosis for you.
 
By the time the Oscars rolled around Ben-Hur was a juggernaut that would not be denied. It seemed a waste of time even to bother finding four other nominees; the thankless mantle of designated also-ran was eventually conferred on Anatomy of a Murder, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Nun’s Story and Room at the Top. Nobody would have blamed those hapless producers if they had just stayed home on award night, so foregone was the conclusion. But what a change a half-century makes; all four of the sacrificial nominees have aged more gracefully than the winner. For that matter, the silent 1925 Ben-Hur holds up better after 85 years than Wyler’s does after 50 — especially now on video, with its proper running speed and Technicolor sequences restored, and spruced up with a stirring Carl Davis score; only the 1959 chariot race surpasses the original (even that, not by much), and Wyler had to leave the race to second-unit men Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt.

 

Mrs. Miniver was also a juggernaut in 1942, but that time the momentum was fueled by patriotism instead of studio hype. In this poster the exclamation point is appended to the claim “Voted the Greatest Movie Ever Made.” Whose votes were counted is left obscure, but there’s no denying that Miniver was beloved in its day, and its Oscar was similarly assured.

The picture began as unabashed pro-British propaganda in their war against Germany; it changed to pro-Allied propaganda when Pearl Harbor was attacked midway through production. Miniver‘s morale value was a real boon to the war effort, and it deserves points for fervent sincerity, but alas, it’s a museum piece today, with the same Hollywooden imitation-Englishness that besets MGM’s 1938 A Christmas Carol. (In Miniver‘s case, British audiences seemed not to mind, no doubt taking the intention for the deed.) Among its fellow best picture nominees, even the rampant flag-waving of Wake Island, The Pied Piper and Yankee Doodle Dandy wears better today. Add in The Invaders, Kings Row, The Pride of the Yankees, The Talk of the Town  and The Magnificent Ambersons — and the case for Mrs. Miniver grows weaker with each title. Potent blow for righteousness that it was in its day, Miniver no longer has the ring of truth it had in 1942.

 

I use that phrase deliberately, because it brings to mind the first time I saw The Best Years of Our Lives, in the early ’70s when Sam Goldwyn had finally released at least some of his films to television. I watched Best Years one night with a friend, a conscientious objector then in the midst of grappling with his draft board at the height of the Vietnam War. As we watched the movie unfold, Wyler’s (and writers MacKinlay Kantor and Robert Sherwood’s, and producer Sam Goldwyn’s) story of three World War II vets struggling to readjust to civilian life, my pacifist-conscientious-objector-draft-dodger pal turned to me and said, “This still has the ring of truth, doesn’t it?”

It was true when he said it during Vietnam, and it would still be true if he said it again today. Of Wyler’s three best pictures, The Best Years of Our Lives is the one that holds up with the fewest allowances made. True, it’s overshadowed today by another 1946 picture, one that it beat in nearly every Oscar category: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Well, I suppose that’s natural; Christmas comes back again every year and World War II only ended once. If the voting for best picture of ’46 got a do-over, Wonderful Life might well take the prize (I’d probably vote for it myself). Olivier’s Henry V would certainly be a strong candidate. Even The Razor’s Edge and The Yearling  might have their cheering sections.
 
Still, none of this negates the award having gone to Best Years. Wyler’s movie is one of those rare ones that tackled a current issue foremost in the minds of nearly everyone who saw it, dealt with the issue head-on and unflinching, and had (yes) the ring of truth to the very audience least likely to tolerate any Hollywood phoniness about it. Not only in America, and not only among the Allies. The movie was a smash hit from Stockholm to Sydney, winning best picture awards (Jan Herman tells us) “from Tokyo to Paris.” When we look at the Oscars for 1946, we don’t have to scratch our heads and wonder what people were thinking back then; The Best Years of Our Lives tells us.
 

So much for those three. But it’s a truism that people seldom win Oscars for their best work, and nobody illustrates the point better than William Wyler. To find his best work — his (ahem) apotheosis — I do think you have to look further than even the best of those three.

High on my short list — and right at the top, probably — would be the two pictures Wyler made on loan to Warner Bros. with Bette Davis. I’ve told the story of Jezebel and the 48 takes with the riding crop. Later on that same picture, when executive producer Hal Wallis made noises about firing Wyler for (what else?) wasting film and ordering too many takes, Davis went to bat for her director and saved his job, offering to work overtime if it would help (and only if they’d keep Wyler on).

True, she was having an affair with Wyler at the time, but she was a hard-nosed career woman who (if you’ll pardon the expression) never let the little head do the thinking for the big head. Whatever was going on during off-hours, she knew he was getting the performance of her life (so far) out of her, and was doing almost as much for others in the cast — George Brent and (of all people) Richard Cromwell were seldom as good, and never better.

He did almost as much on The Letter in 1940, two years later, and with a much better script (from the story by W. Somerset Maugham). Davis didn’t get the Oscar for this one, but she’s nearly as good as she was in Jezebel, showing the feral fang-and-claw passions roiling under a studied veneer of respectability. (The Wyler-Davis magic failed only on their third and final movie together, 1941’s The Little Foxes, and then only because the headstrong Davis wouldn’t listen to him. He wanted a more textured performance, but she insisted on going deep into Wicked Witch territory. Her two-dimensional approach wasn’t enough to sink the movie — Davis was always worth watching, no matter what — but it did allow the all-but-unthinkable:  not one but two other performers, Charles Dingle and Patricia Collinge, stole the picture from her.)

 Other pictures should make the list. Wuthering Heights, no doubt, and These Three and Dodsworth. Hell’s Heroes, despite its early-sound primitivism — or maybe because of it — was a real eye-opener for me, showing a grittier, closer-to-the-bone Wyler than I’d ever seen. And Roman Holiday is a delight from beginning to end; all those heavy-prestige years with Sam Goldwyn, followed by weighty dramas like The Heiress and Detective Story, hadn’t sapped Wyler’s sense of fun, nor his ability to whip up a scrumptious feather-light souffle even in the broiling heat of an Italian summer. The famous Mouth of Truth scene, improvised by Wyler and Gregory Peck on the spot and sprung on an unsuspecting Audrey Hepburn, is a little gem of wicked fun, one of the great moments in Wyler’s career — and Peck’s, for that matter, and Hepburn’s. For that and other reasons, Roman Holiday makes my short list too.
 
Maybe not on the short list but deserving to be remembered (at least more than it seems to have been since it was the hot one to see back in 1965) is The Collector, essentially a two-characters-on-one-set drama of a timid kidnapper and his beautiful captive in which Wyler got brilliant performances from Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar. Coming after the turgid Ben-Hur and the miscarried The Children’s Hour, here was reason to believe Wyler hadn’t lost it, and it gained him his final Oscar nomination. But maybe “it”, whatever it was, was slipping through his fingers at that; Wyler’s hearing and his lungs were deteriorating, and some of the excitement had surely gone out of the game. His next picture, Funny Girl, was a hit, but it strikes me as essentially Ben-Hur with songs, and Barbra Streisand instead of a chariot race to provide excitement (and Wyler’s final acting Oscar). His next and last, The Liberation of L.B. Jones, was a physical ordeal, and critically savaged, barely released, hardly seen. He was proud of the picture, but he knew the grind would kill him if he tried to keep it up, so he got out, having nothing more to prove.
 

So I guess my friend’s curiosity will have to remain unsatisfied, at least by me. I can’t name a single “apotheosis” for William Wyler, and even now I’ve probably left somebody’s favorite out; at least half a dozen other titles spring to mind without even trying. For me, there’s no single “elevation” of the man and his work; there are just too many peaks, like the Himalayas with a dozen Everests.