NFR Project: 'The Heiress' (1949)

 

NFR Project: “The Heiress”

Dir: William Wyler

Scr: Augustus Goetz, Ruth Goetz

Pho: Leo Tover

Ed: William Hornbeck

Premiere: Oct. 6, 1949

115 min.

If ever you want to take a master class in acting, look no further than The Heiress. Although it won Oscars for Best Original Score, Best Costume Design, and Best Art Direction, it is the performances of the three principals – Ralph Richardson, Olivia de Havilland, and Montgomery Clift – that make it an extraordinary film. Let me explain.

First, the source material for the film was the hit 1947 play of the same name, by Augustus and Ruth Goetz, based in turn on the Henry James’ 1880 novel, Washington Square. It’s the story of a rather plain-looking, uncurious, and sheltered young woman, Catherine Sloper (de Havilland) who lives with her wealthy doctor father (Richardson) in luxury. They do not revel in it, they take it as their due. Dr. Sloper resents his daughter, as her birth caused the death of his beloved, beautiful, intelligent, and talented wife.

Catherine is prodded into attending a dance. She is approached by a young and handsome destitute upper-class fortune hunter, Morris Townsend (Clift), who tells her sweet lies and manipulates her into wanting to marry him. Dr. Sloper is onto Morris from the outset, and comments acidly on him, the proposed marriage, and on Catherine’s despised existence in general. Sloper’s barely concealed hostility and contempt for Catherine poison his words of warning about Morris. She ignores them. In fact, she touts her independence, insisting she will live on the $10,000 she has outright rather than on her father’s $30,000.

Finally, the two young lovers agree to elope. Morris finds out that Sloper has changed his will, and that if she marries him, she will not get the $30,000. He makes tender declarations of love, and vanishes. Catherine sits in the parlor, packed, ready to be whisked away. Eventually the truth becomes obvious. He’s not coming.

Fast forward a few years. Sloper is presumably dead. Catherine is still needlepointing, alone in her fabulous Washington Square home. Guess who comes to visit? I won’t spoil the ending, but it is extremely satisfying.

Wyler adapted no fewer than 12 stage plays into movies in his directing career. He was an expert at filming unobtrusively, giving his actors space to work, capturing that pleasure one gets when one sees a superior live performance.

He lets Richardson, de Havilland, and Clift inhabit a scene, really playing it instead of skating over it. The characters seem lived-in. Wyler keeps a respectable distance from the actors, lets them work through a scene slowly if they need to, giving them time to react, to indicate. He creates a superior motion picture by letting his actors work.

The dialogue is highly mannered, in the style of the repressed upper class in mid-to-late 19^th century American society, which was the landscape Henry James painted, again and again. Everyone speaks a carefully coded, polite, formal language – you must discern the emotions from other, visual, cues. (Until Morris appears, there is no display of emotion in the film. How liberating his faux endearments must have felt!) The formal language, the buried emotion of James: similar to the classic samurai film, oddly. A similar hierarchy.

Richardson is best at this: he can steal a scene just standing and staring . . . just a little too hard. De Havilland has the time of her life morphing from a mindless innocent into a wiser, sadder woman, one infinitely more intelligent than the men around her. Clift has to play a heel. He is an inspired con artist, one who lies glibly and convincingly, so much so that you feel he is amazed by his own ability to deceive and manipulate others. He is a very devil. The three clash together in quiet rooms.

The settings are sumptuous and solid, a naturalistic replication of the look of the period. Everyone is dressed to the nines (in fact they never reveal anything of the body), stiffly, at attention. The cinematography is tight, precise. Displays of passion are almost unknown, and the most intense emotions are enunciated on transits up and town the tasteful stairs of their home. An immense amount of emotion comes cascading down through a trio who would never utter a loud word, but who would negotiate the emotional shifts James and the Goetzs put them through.

Miriam Hopkins, a starlet of the 1930s, here plays a dotty, romance-besotted aunt. And Betty Linley, who I've never heard of, has a great scene as Morris' sister, Mrs. Montgomery.

Aaron Copland’s score is instantly identifiable as in his style, but for all that it is as subdued and complex as the story itself. He won the Oscar. And by the way, de Havilland won the Oscar for Best Actress for her performance here. She clearly conveys Catherine’s heady trip into the world of feeling.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Lead Shoes.