The Heiress
William Wyler (1949)
The central theme of The Heiress, based on Henry James’ Washington Square, is how great and enduring distress can enhance a person’s capacity to be cruel – and, in the process, reinforce their unhappiness. The theme is much more salient in the conclusion of Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s stage play, and that of the screenplay for the film version, which the Goetzs also wrote, than it is in the James novella. In the latter, Morris Townsend deserts the heiress Catherine Sloper on the night of their planned elopement, when he discovers that, through her father’s implacable opposition to their relationship, Catherine stands to lose the major part of her inheritance. Morris returns several years later in the hope of reclaiming his bride. She rejects him, perhaps regretfully but calmly and unequivocally too – Morris storms out of the house in Washington Square vowing never to return. The Goetzs retain Catherine’s calmness but it’s used to different and devastating effect in The Heiress. She allows Morris to think she’s prepared to be his wife and bids him return later that evening so they can go to be married by the same priest they planned to visit several years before. After Morris has left the house, Catherine explains to her silly, excitable aunt Lavinia Penniman that she needs no help with packing because she has no intention of going ahead with the wedding. When Morris returns, Catherine instructs her maid Maria to bolt the front door. The film ends with Morris banging on that door, frantically and fruitlessly. Aunt Penniman (as her niece calls her) was with Catherine the night Morris failed to arrive for the elopement and broke the young woman’s heart. Learning that Catherine means to exact revenge when Morris, this time, does turn up at the appointed hour, Aunt Penniman asks, ‘Catherine, can you be so cruel?’ Catherine replies, ‘Yes, Aunt, I can be very cruel. I have been taught by masters’. This line of the Goetzs is one of the most emotionally powerful I know. Olivia de Havilland’s delivery of it in William Wyler’s film is both chilling and thrilling.
The cruelty of the fortune-hunter Morris Townsend is in fact pretty unsophisticated compared with that of Catherine’s father, the wealthy surgeon Dr Austin Sloper. (In the Goetzs’ adaptation, Sloper dies without changing his will so Catherine is still worth the thirty thousand a year Morris had hoped for. In the novella, Catherine’s inheritance is reduced but Morris is evidently needy enough to come looking for what’s left.) Sloper despises his daughter because she is plain and assumes, because she’s plain and lacks verbal articulacy and social skills, that Catherine is also stupid. Dr Sloper’s beloved and beautiful wife died many years before (her daughter seems barely to remember her) and his merciless treatment of Catherine has to be seen in that context. The ever-present daughter – Sloper is doubtful she will ever marry – is an intolerable reminder of the everlasting absence of his wife. Catherine, in conjunction with Sloper’s contempt for her, helps keep his wife’s memory always alive, the wound of losing her always exposed. When Catherine wears a cherry-coloured gown for a ball, her father greets her entrance with, ‘Is it possible this magnificent person is my daughter?’ (The tone of the question, as asked by Ralph Richardson in the film, is richly ambiguous, the withering sarcasm in it not fully disguised.) Encouraged, Catherine reminds her father that her mother used to wear the dress. The reminder is insupportable to Sloper. ‘Oh, yes, Catherine’, he replies, ‘but your mother was fair. She dominated the colour’.
When Sloper realises his daughter won’t be dissuaded from marriage to the penniless Morris Townsend, whose motives are obvious to the doctor, the latter unleashes an outburst of contempt for Catherine and for her love for Morris. Catherine is obdured by the combination of this outburst and Morris’s desertion. Her now ailing father is shocked to discover, through the following exchange[1] that she has ‘found a tongue at last’:
‘Catherine: … You thought any clever, handsome man would be as bored with me as you were. And would love me as little as you did. It was not love that made you protect me. It was contempt. Am I to thank you for that?
Sloper: Some day you will realize I did you a great service.
Catherine: I can tell you now what you have done; you have cheated me. If you could not love me, you should have let someone else try.
Sloper: Morris Townsend didn’t love you, Catherine.
Catherine: I know that now, thanks to you.
Sloper: Better to know it now than twenty years hence.
Catherine: Why? I lived with you for twenty years before I found out that you didn’t love me. I don’t know that Morris would have cheated me or starved me for affection more than you did.’
Morris Townsend is the love of Catherine’s life and she inherits her father’s approach to preserving the memory of a great love and the pain of a great hurt. Once Morris has gone (and Sloper has died), she renounces the idea of marriage and spends her days as the spinster-orphan mistress of 16 Washington Square – with what we understand to be an increasingly limited social life but an undiminished capacity for tapestry work. Time hasn’t been that kind to the Morris who eventually returns to Catherine in Washington Square – ‘She would never have known him’. In the film, it’s the fact that Morris’s looks, apart from the addition of a moustache, are largely unchanged that makes his reappearance so poignant (although Montgomery Clift subtly suggests Morris is morally reduced – further reduced – from the younger man who left Catherine). You can wonder if Catherine will be able to resist him, having never loved anyone else in the intervening years. It may be Morris’s violation of what he has remained to Catherine during that time – a man whom she loved utterly but who was interested only in her money – that seals his fate. As she tells Aunt Penniman:
‘He has grown greedier with the years. The first time he only wanted my money, now he wants my love, too. … Well, he came to the wrong house, and he came twice. I shall see that he never comes a third time.’
The opening titles of The Heiress appear as lettering on a sampler and the images on the screen come to life as if the tapestry were the frame of the story and the medium through which it’s to be told. The tapestry is a crucial motif. Her father’s scathing report on Catherine’s comprehensive inadequacy culminates in a devastating backhanded compliment: ‘With one exception, my dear – you embroider neatly’. (Here too Ralph Richardson’s reading – stressing ‘neatly’ at least as strongly as ‘embroider’ – turns a good line into a stunning one.) At the very end of the film, Catherine is finishing a piece of work with an alphabet running along its top and bottom. She does the ‘Z’ as the clock chimes and Morris arrives at the door. This is another interesting difference from the book. In Washington Square, James is explicit that Catherine has left herself with nothing to do but embroidery:
‘And Morris Townsend strode out of the house, leaving Mrs Penniman staring.
Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlor, picking up her morsel of fancywork, had seated herself with it again – for life, as it were.’
At the end of the picture Catherine ascends the stairs, leaving the tapestry below – a completed project. This might seem like a typical Hollywood flourish, sealing the protagonist’s ‘victory’ in spite of everything. I think Wyler’s ending is arguably more desolating than Henry James’ – because the victory is so hollow and because Catherine is so consumed by it there’s not even a next piece of needlework in prospect. This closing sequence epitomises the sense I always get watching this film that, because The Heiress is a period piece (introduced on the screen as taking place in ‘New York – a hundred years ago’) and its appurtenances are familiar, its scale and depth can be seen by the audience to be safely circumscribed. It’s largely because of this that I find the film not just emotionally brutal and unrelenting in its content but almost subversive in its style, in William Wyler’s exploiting our being so well acquainted with the mise en scène.
Wyler’s is an art that conceals art – or at least auteurship. In a piece on his last film, The Liberation of L J Jones, in the ‘Lost and Found’ feature in January 2011’s Sight and Sound, Neil Sinyard describes how Wyler’s ‘critical reputation had fallen dramatically during the heyday of auteurism. His films were dismissed as cold and impersonal’. I don’t know enough about the auteur theory to understand how it accommodates the idea of a film-maker putting herself or himself at the service of material created by a different artist and/or for a different medium – as Wyler, in presenting the Goetzs’ adaptation of Henry James, does in The Heiress. (I don’t understand, for example, whether Orson Welles is considered to be just as much as an auteur in his Shakespeare films as in works based on original screenplays or adapted from lesser literary sources.) What makes The Heiress such a brilliant piece of work is that Wyler, without trying to appropriate the material, interprets it both faithfully and radically. This isn’t to say that the film is untrammelled by the conventions of contemporary Hollywood. Aaron Copland’s score, combined with the melody of ‘Plaisir d’amour’, is very effective but the music is sometimes used in ways that now seem obtrusive and antique (for example, to signify a character’s light-heartedness rushing up or skipping down a flight of stairs). Casting a truly plain actress as Catherine Sloper could not have happened in a Paramount picture of the time: Olivia de Havilland needs a good deal of make-up to fit the bill. (The studio probably regarded it as important that we see the make-up for what it is – that we’re not in any danger of thinking a plain woman is really the lead.)
De Havilland plays Catherine with great depth of feeling. Her variety in the opening scenes, culminating in Catherine’s first meeting with Morris Townsend, is beautifully achieved. When Catherine’s getting ready for the ball and talking in her room with Aunt Penniman (Miriam Hopkins, in one of her most enjoyable and likeable performances), she has both a physical and a verbal freedom that’s lost once she’s dressed up and in more demanding company. When Morris, at the piano, plays and sings ‘Plaisir d’amour’ and translates the song’s opening lyric[2], there’s a terrible apprehension in de Havilland’s face that it will prove to be true. Her breakdown when Morris doesn’t come and doesn’t come is very affecting. My only reservation about de Havilland comes once the worm has turned, in Catherine’s last conversation with Morris. There’s no misreading her resigned determination to make him suffer and it’s difficult to believe that Morris isn’t more alert to the meaning of her trance-like calm (he might not realise what she has in mind but he’d have to be disquieted by her manner). A more fluid actress than Olivia de Havilland might have been able to achieve the deception more tantalisingly.
The greatness of the acting of Ralph Richardson and Montgomery Clift is in the fusion of sympathy and accuracy they bring to portraying men who remain dislikeable but who are also fully humanised through these characterisations. Richardson, who had just played Dr Sloper on the London stage, renders in every gesture a man who’s kept himself in control by limiting the possibilities of his life and by being single-mindedly callous. Sloper has a professional and social smile that is poised between a sneer and a mask and which the malignant hopelessness in his eyes contradicts. This is a man who keeps up appearances: even at death’s door Sloper is smartly dressed – it’s Ralph Richardson’s genius that he can show the doctor to be enfeebled without relying on any obvious signs of decline.
It may have been Hollywood convention again that caused Wyler (according to Amy Lawrence in The Passion of Montgomery Clift) not to be fully satisfied with Clift’s playing of Morris Townsend because he seemed too ‘modern’. Viewed at this distance in time, Clift is completely convincing as a young man in mid-nineteenth-century New York even if he’s not what you would expect in late 1940s Hollywood. When Morris first appears (with his back to the camera), we hear his voice before we see his face – but we see Catherine see his face. It’s almost comical that this girl who struggles to get anyone to ask her to dance finds herself confronted by the young Montgomery Clift. This opening scene between them (the business with the lists of non-existent dancing partners and with the glasses of claret cup) is completely delightful – and riveting. You’re often conscious in The Heiress that Clift is beguiling the viewer as well as Catherine but that disorienting, ambiguous charm allows him to create a portrait of a young man rather desperately on the make – and a weak character – that is more complex than the Morris Townsend in the script. Clift’s glamour enables us to see him as Catherine sees him; his interpretative skills convey what Morris intends to do. What’s great about the performance is that Clift’s Morris really is both these things – a beau idéal and a less than fully accomplished mercenary. Knowing what happens in The Heiress, you’re gripped from the start in anticipation of the unhappy events that are going to unfold. Watching de Havilland, Richardson and Clift working together, you’re gripped over and over again.
Academy Awards for Best Actress, Score, Black-and-White Art Direction (John Meehan, Harry Horner, Emile Kuri) and Costume Design (Edith Head and Gile Steele). Wyler, Richardson (Supporting Actor) and the cinematographer (Leo Tover) were all nominated, as was the film as Best Picture. It’s mad but somehow (given the character) unsurprising that Clift wasn’t nominated. It’s inexplicable that the Goetzs were similarly insulted (unless this was punishment for doing little to change their excellent script for the stage play).
26 December 2010
[1] Lines quoted are from the script of the stage play but the corresponding lines in the screenplay are virtually unchanged from these.
[2] ‘Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’un moment. … Chagrin d’amour dure toute la vie.’