William Wyler (1952)

Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy was the source material for George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1951), one of Hollywood’s most celebrated dramas of the early post-war era.  Just a year later, another Dreiser novel – his first, Sister Carrie – was adapted for the screen.  William Wyler’s Carrie isn’t nearly as well known as A Place in the Sun (or as Carrie‘s 1976 namesake) but this is a powerful romantic tragedy, one that sees Laurence Olivier at his best.  Watching bits of his famous Richard III (1955) on television the other week, I found Olivier, not for the first time, ridiculous.  As Richard, his delivery and diction, though technically formidable, are excessively stylised, and his movements (the limp and so on) erratic; because his line readings make clear the thoughts behind the words, Olivier’s confidential looks to camera are a tautology.  The experience of Carrie couldn’t be more different.  This is great screen acting, in the same class as Olivier’s Archie Rice in Tony Richardson’s The Entertainer (1960).

Sister Carrie was first published in 1900 and the film’s action is contemporary.  Jennifer Jones is Carrie Meeber, who leaves her family home in rural Missouri to make her way in Chicago.  She’s following in the footsteps of her elder sister Minnie (Jacqueline deWit), already living in the city, but Carrie knows she can do better than Minnie – ‘I went through school,’ she informs Charlie Drouet (Eddie Albert), the affable travelling salesman who chats her up on the train journey to Chicago and gives her his card.  She moves in, as their rent-paying lodger, with Minnie and her husband (Robert Foulk), who live, barely above the breadline, in rooms on the South Side.  Carrie is soon frustrated.  She slaves long hours and with growing resentment as a machinist in a shoe factory until she injures a finger at work and is promptly fired by the sweatshop foreman (Charles Halton).  Although immediately suspicious of Charlie Drouet’s smooth talking, Carrie is now desperate enough to look him up.  Hearing her tale of woe, he hands her a ten-dollar bill and invites her to dinner at Fitzgerald’s, a high-end restaurant and bar.  Arriving early, before Charlie, Carrie is directed from the bar, where women aren’t allowed, to the adjoining restaurant.  The man who directs her there is George Hurstwood (Olivier).

When he’s not wearing eccentric disguise on screen, Laurence Olivier is a naturally classy presence – a quality reinforced, perhaps especially in America, by his own public persona:  by the end of the 1940s Olivier was not only a beautifully spoken English gentleman but a knight of the realm.  I’m not sure if Carrie immediately realises George Hurstwood is the manager of Fitzgerald’s rather than one of its upper-crust patrons; I have to admit this viewer didn’t realise it at first.  Whatever, socially ambitious Carrie does instantly see in George a man who’s a cut above.  She tried to refuse Charlie’s ten dollars and, after Minnie chides her for not succeeding, turns up at Fitzgerald’s only in order to return the money.  Charlie soon arrives and the dinner goes ahead though it’s a moot point whether he or George Hurstfield is the reason Carrie changes her mind.  Even so, she ends the evening in Charlie’s apartment and, jobless, stays there.  When the neighbours gossip and Carrie uneasily asks about getting married, Charlie fobs her off by inviting George, who he knows impressed her, to the apartment.  What neither Charlie nor his kept woman realises is that George, an unhappily married man and father of two grown-up children, has already and irrevocably fallen for Carrie.

She soon reciprocates his feelings but doesn’t know George is married until Charlie tells her.  When she consequently breaks off from seeing George, he tricks her into believing that Charlie’s in hospital and that he’ll take there; she agrees and George virtually abducts her.  It’s accidental that he finds himself in possession of $10,000 of the restaurant owner’s money (George accidentally locks a timed safe as he’s cashing up for the night); but when he learns that Mr Fitzgerald (Basil Ruysdael), under pressure from George’s shrewish wife Julie (Miriam Hopkins), is planning to pay his salary direct to her in future, George absconds to New York, with the takings and Carrie.  She doesn’t know about the theft until long after a bond company agent (Ray Teal) dispatched by Fitzgerald turns up at their apartment to demand the money back.  In a culminating falsehood, George assures Carrie that Julie has divorced him, and they marry.   Carrie is pregnant when she learns the bigamous truth.  She miscarries.

This sounds a melodramatic sequence of events but it doesn’t play out as such.  That’s no surprise, of course, with William Wyler at the controls and a screenplay by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, who had worked to great effect with Wyler on The Heiress (1949).  Laurence Olivier is in every sense the star of the show, though.  George lies or fails to mention things to Carrie in order not to lose her; Olivier depicts brilliantly the combination of desire and desperation that dictate his deceptions.   As a young stage actor, Olivier was celebrated for, as well as his extraordinary vocal qualities, his athletic invention and daring, and his physicality as an actor endured.  You see it in late work like his deathbed scene as Lord Marchmain in the Granada television version of Brideshead Revisited (1981).  You see it in mid-career bloom in Carrie, too.  When George first kisses Carrie, he’s hungry, animalistic.  The wonder of the performance is that, in the climax to the story, when George is destitute and ill, Olivier’s movements are powerful in effect but controlled in execution – not at all theatrical in the pejorative sense.

The plotting becomes more mechanical and less convincing in order to set the stage for the tragic finale.  George can’t get a job, however menial, supposedly because it’s (very!) common knowledge that he stole money.  Julie eventually agrees to a divorce, in exchange for George’s agreement not to ask for a cent of the proceeds of the couple’s house sale.  Living in virtual poverty with him, Carrie decides to try for work in a chorus line and, to her amazement, gets it.  (To the amazement of the audience, too:  the auditions are one of the film’s weakest sequences.)  George reads in the society page of a newspaper that his son (William Reynolds), who has made a rich marriage, is returning with his bride from honeymoon.  Carrie encourages her husband to go and meet George Jr; he turns up at the docks only to feel consumed by shame and hide  his face as his family walks by.  (Olivier does even this well.)  When George returns to New York, he finds a goodbye note from Carrie, in which she says that she isn’t good for him.  Years pass … She becomes a successful actress while George is homeless.  He hangs around outside the theatre one night and speaks her name.  They talk in her dressing room; she orders food and gives George money, eager to put things right:  Carrie blames herself that he sacrificed his comfortable life for love of her.  While she’s out of the dressing room, George briefly contemplates the gas burner on a stove.  He returns the paper money to Carrie’s handbag and removes from it just a quarter coin before disappearing into the night.

Although Olivier dominates, the acting is strong nearly all the way down the cast list:  Walter Baldwin, as the heroine’s father, regretfully buying his daughter’s one-way ticket to Chicago at the local station in the brief first scene, sets the tone; Ray Teal, emphatically one-note as the bond company man, is an exception.  Eddie Albert, a year before his best-known collaboration with Wyler on Roman Holiday (and three years before he played another ingratiating salesman in Oklahoma!), is terrific as Charlie Drouet.  Albert is such a naturally likeable and empathetic actor that you can’t help rooting for questionable Charlie (who does show Carrie kindness in the process of exploiting her).  Miriam Hopkins is less satisfying; her if-looks-could-kill interpretation of bitterly vindictive Julie would work better if Hopkins managed more than the one look and was able to suggest that the Hurstfields’ marriage may not always have been as bad as it has become.  Jennifer Jones appears (as the opening credits point out) by agreement with her movie-mogul husband David O Selznick but, in Wyler’s capable hands, delivers one of her best performances, particularly in the early stages.  In the first Chicago scenes, Jones’s Carrie, anxious to do better for herself, is far from likeable though her vulnerability takes the edge off her prickliness.  This means that, although Carrie’s eventual burgeoning theatre career is a plot requirement, it makes emotional sense:  you believe the young woman who so resented working in a shoe factory would be determined enough, once she gets her chance on the stage, to stick with and make a lasting success of it.

In the home straight, Wyler and the Goetzes manage to muffle the creaking plot machinery with a few echoes that ring true.  In the early part of their relationship, Carrie and George love theatre-going together and he encourages her to try her hand at amateur acting; you remember these things when she becomes a pro.  George’s refusal to take dollar bills from Carrie in the closing scene recalls Carrie’s reluctance to accept Charlie’s ten bucks gift/loan/bribe.  David Raksin’s score is only occasionally a bit much:  for the most part, it serves the narrative well.  Carrie wasn’t a success at the box office or with many critics at the time of its release.  According to Wikipedia, Wyler felt in retrospect ‘that the film was too depressing during a time when American audiences wanted escapist entertainment to take their minds off the Cold War’.  Telling an ‘immoral’ love story couldn’t have helped either.  But Carrie has aged very well indeed.

25 April 2024