The Heiress (1949)
Directed by William Wyler

Film Review

It is a commonly held view that American cinema reached its creative peak towards the end of the 1930s.  The fallacy of this is at once apparent when you consider the sheer abundance of cinematic marvels that came out of the Hollywood studios in the decade that followed - a cornucopia that was fuelled as much by the huge influx of talent from Europe as by the burgeoning importance of cinema as the primary medium of mass entertainment.  Occupying a dominant position on the quality end of the spectrum was the lavish adaptation of literary classics, a prime example of this being William Wyler's 1949 masterpiece The Heiress - a flawless retelling of Henry James's 1880 novel Washington Square.  The film takes its title from the successful stage play version of James's highly regarded novel, its authors - the husband-and-wife team Augustus and Ruth Goetz - also providing the screenplay.

When Olivia de Havilland saw the Goetzes' play on Broadway she was so impressed that she immediately approached Wyler and persuaded him to adapt it for the cinema at Paramount Studios, with her naturally taking the leading role (the part created by Wendy Hiller on stage).  It so happened that Paramount had just signed a three-picture deal with a star-in-the-making, Montgomery Clift and the opportunity of pairing this hyper-charismatic, hyper-talented youngster with the Oscar-winning box office magnet de Havilland was too good to miss.  Clift had so far featured in only two films - Howard Hawks' Red River (1948) and Fred Zinnemann's The Search (1948) - but already he was a movie sensation and the Hollywood studios were falling over themselves to hire him.  One of the changes to the Goetzes' play which Paramount insisted on was that the character Morris Townsend be made more sympathetic, so as not to harm Clift's prospects for playing the romantic lead in subsequent films, which would include George Steven's phenomenally successful A Place in the Sun (1952), where he starred alongside Elizabeth Taylor.

For the role of de Havilland's father in the film, the primly respectable Dr Sloper, Ralph Richardson was an obvious casting choice, as he had already played the part on stage to great acclaim (opposite Peggy Ashcroft) in a popular run of the original play in London, England, which premiered in February 1949.  Although Richardson was best known as a stage actor - one of the finest England ever produced - he also had an impressive string of film credits to his name, Carol Reed's Fallen Idol (1948) bringing him international renown.  Whereas critical success had come easy to Clift and Richardson, de Havilland had had a far more difficult time convincing the world of her abilities, and it was the snobbish belief that the latter belonged to a lower class of performer that led to a highly strained working relationship between de Havilland and her two male co-stars.  As it turned out, the friction between the three lead performers was to the film's advantage, heightening the tangible sense of estrangement and antagonism that develops between the heroine Catherine and the two selfish, manipulative men who ruin her life.

Crafted with an abundance of intelligence and delicacy, The Heiress is undoubtedly the best film William Wyler ever made, the crowning achievement in a career replete with too many critical and commercial successes to list.  From the 1930s to the 1960s, Wyler was one of Hollywood's most talented and most commercially successful film directors, his oeuvre stuffed to the gills with much-loved classics that include Wuthering Heights (1939), The Letter (1940), Mrs Miniver (1942), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and Ben-Hur (1959).  Wyler's cinema may not be as showy or groundbreaking as that of some of his contemporaries but it possesses a level of sustained creative flair, human feeling and psychological depth that sets it apart, with an indefinable timeless quality that makes his films startlingly relevant to this day.

By staying so close to the original stage play (retaining its structure, minimal dramatis personae and most of the dialogue), The Heiress risks being seen as little more than a piece of filmed theatre, but such is the quality of the mise-en-scène and design (in every area of production) that the film transcends this perceived flaw with ease and stands as one of its director's most visually striking and compelling works.  It was through his close association with the esteemed cinematographer Gregg Toland that William Wyler realised the visual power and dramatic possibilities of deep focus photography, which he subsequently made an essential part of his art.  By having an extended depth of field, Wyler was able to position his actors in the foreground, midground and background in the same shot, providing some interesting possibilities for character interaction.  In The Heiress, the growing spatial distancing of the heroine Catherine from the two men who attempt to control her (her father and lover) underscores both her widening emotional separation from her tormentors and her transition to an independent assertive woman.

It is through Wyler's adept use of deep focus photography that Catherine's ornately furnished mid-19th century townhouse soon takes on the character of a prison, the gilded cage from which Catherine seems destined never to escape.  It is in only a few scenes that the young woman is seen outside her opulent New York home, scenes in which she acquires an unexpected vitality and shows some sign of the free-spirit struggling for release within her suffocatingly tight corsets.  For most of the time, Catherine is seen as just a part of the decor of her father's immaculate residence - a submissive mouse of a girl gradually turning into an embittered old maid within a prudish edifice of bourgeois respectability that is at first her prison and then her sanctuary.

There are two features of the house that provide the film with its two most powerfully moving moments.  The first is the stately staircase that appears to take pride of place in the Washington Square residence.  It is up this coldly impersonal artificial hill that the broken-hearted Catherine is to be seen laboriously lugging her suitcase after being jilted by her lover.  It is a scene of devastating poignancy, the staging of it and de Havilland's understated performance achieving an emotional wallop of such resounding intensity that you can hardly bare to watch.  At the end of the film, the locked front door - so terribly illustrative of Catherine's entire life - becomes just as potent a dramatic device as the staircase.  On the one hand, the locked door is a symbol of victory, signifying the unfortunate woman's ultimate triumph over the sex that has blighted her existence.  But it also screams out the sad implication that Catherine is a woman destined to live her entire life alone, forever separated not only from the man she has rejected but any other who might have brought happiness and fulfilment to her.   Throughout the film, but particularly in these two crucial scenes, Aaron Copland's richly expressive score drives home the tragedy and irony of the heroine's plight, making us grimly aware of the fatalist undercurrents that are driving her in her process of metamorphosis from sad girl to even sadder woman.

Olivia de Havilland won her second Academy Award for her performance in The Heiress, and rightly so.  Her harrowingly authentic portrayal of Catherine Sloper is unquestionably the highpoint of her career and a crucial stepping stone to the more complex roles she was desperate to move on to after years of being typecast as the eternal ingénue.  In the three or four years prior to this, the actress had taken audiences and critics by surprise with a series of unglamorous, down-to-earth and occasionally controversial roles that gave her ample scope for radically altering her screen persona.  From her Oscar winning turn in Mitchell Leisen's hard-hitting maternal drama To Each His Own (1946) to her convincing portrayal of a mentally ill woman in Anatole Litvak's The Snake Pit (1948), Olivia de Havilland had demonstrated not only a willingness to take on more challenging parts, but an awe-inspiring talent only a few thought she possessed.

It is through her character's gradual but striking transformation in The Heiress that de Havilland showed the world what a remarkably accomplished actress she was.  When we first meet Catherine, she is the very picture of spinsterly gaucheness, so lacking in confidence, so timidly self-effacing, that she appears almost afraid to take up any space in the frame.  The Catherine we see at the end of the film is a totally different character - an assertive mature woman who is not only aware of the power she exerts over others, but also has the hardness of heart to exercise that power with scant regard to the pain she may inflict.  A key scene is the one in which Catherine sits in silence in her drawing room as her lover Morris makes futile attempts to gain entrance to her house to resume their aborted love affair.  The expressions we see playing on Catherine's face as we hear Morris's desperate entreaties show us more clearly than any quantity of dialogue the thoughts and feelings that are running through her mind.  Is that joy at a long-anticipated reunion that we fleetingly glimpse in her eyes?  The impression vanishes in an instant when we see a look of bitter reproach take control of her countenance.  Years of conflicting emotions are brought to the surface one after the other, each altering the expression in Catherine's surprisingly malleable features.  We see the rejected lover, the indignant daughter, the disillusioned old maid and finally the look of elation of a woman who has finally got what she has long yearned for.  De Havilland's performance has such nuance and depth that at every stage Catherine's metamorphosis from oppressed nursling to fully independent woman rings true with a blistering reality - to such a degree that The Heiress acquires a pro-feminist perspective of astonishing power and modernity.

Whilst this is unquestionably de Havilland's film, it would be a sin to overlook the contributions of Montgomery Clift and Ralph Richardson, who both deliver performances of exceptional quality under Wyler's faultless direction.  Clift's charisma and demonic good looks make him a natural scene-stealer but it is through his teasingly ambiguous portrayal of Morris Townsend (a far less obvious rogue than he is in the original novel and stage play) that he shows himself to be an actor of formidable ability.  At no point in the film can we be sure of Morris's motives.  It is so tempting to see him as Dr Sloper does, the scurrilous gold-digger, and yet Clift's natural air of boyish innocence pulls us in the other direction, towards Catherine's notion of the romantic beau idéal.  Likewise, Richardson's Dr Sloper is far from being the one-dimensional archetype.  He may at first resemble the heartless, starch-shirted patriarch, but it soon becomes apparent that his somewhat abusive treatment of his daughter arises from a genuine loving concern over her future prospects.  The fact that none of the three main characters is easily pinned down makes for some interesting dynamics and prevents this from ever being the usual melodrama in which one protagonist unequivocally occupies the moral high-ground.  Catherine, Morris and Sloper are all sufficiently complex and ambivalent in their behaviour that they each have aspects of victimhood and monstrosity, and we can never be sure whether their misfortunes are brought about by others or are merely the result of their own failings.

The Heiress may not have been a commercial success on its first release but it garnered considerable critical acclaim and is now regarded as one of the supreme achievements from Hollywood's Golden Age.  In addition to de Havilland's Oscar win for Best Actress, the film was nominated for seven other Academy Awards (including Best Picture and Best Director), winning three other awards in the categories of Best Original Score, Best Art Direction on a B&W film (John Meehan, Harry Horner, Emile Kuri ) and Best Costume Design on a B&W film (Edith Head).  De Havilland also took the Golden Globe for Best Actress.  Henry James's novels have had many notable screen adaptations but none can compare with the sheer artistry and emotional resonance of William Wyler's The Heiress.  The only one that comes close to matching its narrative power, psychological depth and cinematographic brilliance is Jack Clayton's wondrously chilling adaptation of James's famous ghost story The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents (1961), although Martin Gabel's The Lost Moment (1947) (based on The Aspern Papers) is also well worth a look - if only for its grimly oppresive atmosphere.

Film Synopsis

In the 1840s, Dr Austin Sloper, a successful medical practitioner, lives with his daughter Catherine in New York's affluent Washington Square.  In her early twenties, Catherine is a disappointment to her father, lacking the beauty, intelligence and social graces of his deceased wife.  The prospect that one day his daughter will marry a suitable man of their social standing is Dr Sloper's abiding concern.  To that end, he allows Catherine's romantically inclined Aunt Lavinia to move in, hoping that under her influence the gauche social embarrassment will one day blossom into a highly eligible bride-to-be.  One evening at a society ball, Catherine makes the acquaintance of a handsome young man, Morris Townsend.  It isn't long before she is head-over-heels in love with the smooth-talking bachelor and readily accepts his hasty proposal of marriage.

Dr Sloper is far from pleased by this unexpected turn of events and immediately suspects Morris of being a fortune hunter.  Making enquiries, he soon discovers that the prospective bridegroom has neither money nor profession, and has recently squandered his modest inheritance on a grand tour of Europe.  Catherine remains firm in her resolve to marry Morris, even when her father tells her he will disinherit her, leaving her with just the 10,000 dollars per annum she inherited from her mother.  Dr Sloper's hopes that his daughter will come to her senses after a six month stay in Europe come to nothing.  Exasperated, he insists that Morris's only interest in Catherine is her wealth - there is nothing else she can possibly offer him.  Catherine is so hurt by her father's cruel outburst that she immediately makes up her mind to elope with Morris.

The two lovers make their plans to run away that very evening, Morris apparently undeterred by the news that his future bride will only have a third of the income that was promised before being disinherited.  The appointed hour passes and Morris fails to turn up at the Sloper residence.  Catherine takes no consolation from the fact that her father was right in his assessment of the young man's character.  A few years pass, during which time Dr Sloper dies and his daughter lives alone, hardened and wiser through her disappointment in love.  Then, one day, Morris turns up unexpectedly, virtually destitute after failing to make his fortune in California.  He assures Catherine that his love for her is as deep as it ever was and that the only reason he jilted her was to prevent her from losing her inheritance.  Once again, Morris asks his beloved if she will be his wife and, seemingly taken in by his protestations of love, Catherine consents.  When he returns that evening, Morris has a nasty surprise in store for him...