Tag: William Wyler

Ben-Hur (1959)

Charlton Heston fights for freedom in the large scale but strangely empty Ben-Hur

Director: William Wyler

Cast: Charlton Heston (Judah Ben-Hur), Jack Hawkins (Quintus Arrius), Haya Harareet (Esther), Stephen Boyd (Messala), Hugh Griffith (Sheik Ilderim), Martha Scott (Miriam), Cathy O’Donnell (Tirzah), Sam Jaffe (Simonides), Finlay Currie (Balthasar), Frank Thring (Pontius Pilate), Terence Longdon (Drusus), George Relph (Tiberius Caesar), Andre Morell (Sextus)

Ben-Hur is big. Hammering home its monumentalism, the poster features the colossal stone-carved title dwarfing the people below. It’s the sort of Hollywood epic where the numbers – 10,000 extras! 2,500 horses! Over a million props! 1.1 million feet of film! 11 Oscars! – are as much a part of what you are sitting down to watch as the characters and story. Ben-Hur sits at the apex of the Hollywood Biblical epic: three and a half hours long, the most expensive film ever made (at the time). Age hasn’t always treated it kindly, and its eleven Oscars give it a sort of classic status it’s very hard for the first-time viewer to reconcile with what you actually see on the screen. Fundamentally, Ben-Hur is part spectacle, part pageant: some striking sequences linked together by the twee and the forgettable. Entertainingly middle-brow and over honoured, it’s a classic mostly because of what it represents rather than what it is.

Adapted from General Lew Wallace’s best-selling doorstop (he basically invented the airport novel, decades before the first airport ever opened), the story follows the fortunes of Jewish prince Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) in the early years of the first millennium. Ben-Hur grew up regarding Roman officer Messala (Stephen Boyd) as a brother. But when Ben-Hur refuses to help Messala identify Jewish insurgents, their friendship comes to an end. Before we know it, Messala suses trumped up charges to send Ben-Hur in chains to a life rowing as a galley slave while his mother Miriam (Martha Scott) and sister Tirzah (Cathy O’Donnell) are imprisoned. Ben-Hur survives the galleys – even becoming the adopted son of Roman Consul Quintus Arrius (Jack Hawkins). When he returns to Jerusalem, will he take his revenge on Messala? Or will the teachings of the mysterious preacher spreading the word of God change his life?

For bursts of its (huge) run-time Ben-Hur is gripping, exciting stuff. The action when it comes is superbly done and some of the moments of high-emotion really hit the spot. But it’s impossible to avoid that, for large chunks of time in-between, Ben-Hur is ponderous, overlong, more than a bit self-important and a little twee. Frequently the film grinds to a halt to parade its numbers: after all we need a long intro to the chariot race so we can see all those extras and horses. Things like this frequently don’t drive forward the story, or help the pace: but Ben-Hur was at least as much about wowing the audience as it was about telling a story.

William Wyler was offered more money than any director in history to bring it to the screen. He produces a film as faultless in its professionalism, as it is impersonal. Wyler – a director who worked best with actor-led stories – struggled with the vastness of Hur: his visual compositions often an awkward attempt to mix the width of the frame with the intimacy of two characters talking. His style doesn’t help here: the heaviness of the cameras made them difficult to move, making many of the conversation scenes of the film rather flat and dull to look at. Wyler doesn’t put a foot wrong, but it feels more like a competent professional ticking boxes.

It’s the big set piece moments – of which there three – which really have stuck in people’s minds. Those would be: the early scenes with Messala/Ben-Hur, the naval battle sequence and the chariot race. Outside of those moments – which are all, in their own ways, very memorable – it’s amazing to me every time I watch it how much of the film I fail to remember. I certainly had forgotten how damn much of the movie is left post Chariot race (over 45 minutes!), the film dragging on through the Miriam/Tirzah leprosy sub-plot intercut with moments from the life of Jesus (often with dialogue of the “He’s giving a Sermon on that Mount” variety). There are several moments in the film where events play out at great length inversely proportional to their interest.

But those set-pieces are great. The chariot race alone probably made the film the success it is. It’s ten minutes of compelling drama, gripping stunts: a feast of tight editing, dynamic camera work and thundering sound effects. Shot by a second unit – although, to be fair, supervised in its planning and editing by Wyler – it’s the heart of the movie. Viscerally enjoyable, it perhaps stands out because it’s the most earthy, exciting, real thing in a movie that can be rather stagy and turgid.

Running it close is the naval battle sequence – show-casing a gravely Jack Hawkins – very well-done (and disguising its water tank shooting origins), particularly because Wyler keeps most of the focus on the slave rowers in the bowels of the ship. While fire and arrows fly up top, and boarding parties clash, it’s from the slaves perspective that we see a vessel approach to ram the ship – and their terror at drowning that we feel. It’s another fine use of the epic big-screen. With virtually no dialogue, it’s also a triumph of visual story-telling, communicating a host of emotions and actions with brilliant efficiency.

The Messala/Ben-Hur sequences have stuck in the mind for other reasons. Long-running debates exist about who actually wrote the script. The credit goes to Ken Turnberg, but Gore Vidal long claimed his fingerprints were on most of the dialogue. (Wyler and Heston disagreed, giving the credit to playwright Christopher Fry – Heston even thanked Fry in his Oscar acceptance speech.) Vidal liked to claim he directed Boyd to play these scenes as if Messala was a spurned lover of Ben-Hur – taking an equal delight in claiming Heston had no idea of this subtext. Wyler argued he had no memory of this, and denied any such direction to Boyd took place. The truth will never really be known, but to me the idea of the writer on a film like this taking creative control seems a stretch.

Anyway, it adds a frisson to the scenes – and its undeniable there is more than a touch of camp to them. To be honest I think a lot of this is due to Stephen Boyd’s OTT performance as Messala. He plays every single scene at a ludicrous pitch – throughout the chariot race he makes Dick Dastardly look the model of underplaying – and I can well imagine Vidal enjoyed taking advantage of his over-emphasis in these sequences to spin an amusing story of sneaking in a homo-erotic subtext.

The acting in general is fairly mundane – for all the film won two Oscars for its performers. Heston (in his only nomination) was named Best Actor. He’s a monumental actor, best used in roles that could have been chiselled from marble, but this is not his best (look to Khartoum, Agony and the Ecstasy or Planet of the Apes for starters). Much like Boyd he’s prone to over-emotionalism (most of the last 40 minutes feature him throwing his face into his hands), intermixed with moments of stony po-facedness. Hugh Griffith won the other Oscar (insanely generous considering he beat out Scott and O’Connell in Anatomy of a Murder) and his hammy, black-face is increasingly uncomfortable. Few of the other performers make much of an impact (although I enjoyed seeing an unbilled John Le Mesurier as a Roman doctor).

The one thing about Ben-Hur that lives up to its grandness is Miklos Rosza’s brilliant -and hugely influential – score. A brilliant mix of the inspiring epic, the grandiose and the deeply spiritual, you can hear its DNA throughout the works of John Williams and several others. It’s one of the longest scores of all time (three hours of music!) but it captures the tone of every scene perfectly, helping to build the overall effect.

It even manages to make some of the Jesus sequences work. The film is never more twee than when it touches on the Bible. Jesus is only ever shown from behind, but always as the classic long-haired, beatific figure, practically floating through the ether. Sequences that show the nativity, the sermon on the mount and the crucifixion have a Sunday School earnestness about them, largely free of drama and seem designed to be as inoffensive (and uninteresting) as possible. It’s when the film is as its most self-consciously earnest.

And Ben-Hur is a very earnest film. A professional job – with a director wrestling all those numbers – it’s got some striking sequences but even more flat, twee and forgettable moments. With acting that ranges from overly-earnest to just over the top, its classic status is more about what it is. The largest, most expensive, most honoured film of the Biblical epic genre. Its’ most famous for all those Oscars and the chariot race: in other words ten minutes of its screen time and garlands from a ceremony we often say honours the wrong films. Judged on film merits, Ben-Hur is not the best but not the worst. But it’s more about all its numbers, the vast array of things in it. It represents Big Studio investment: it’s about money. No wonder Hollywood garlanded it with so many Oscars.

The Collector (1965)

Samantha Eggar is held captive by Terence Stamp in the unsettling The Collector

Director: William Wyler

Cast: Terence Stamp (Freddie Clegg), Samantha Eggar (Miranda Grey), Mona Washbourne (Aunt Annie), Maurice Dallimore (Colonel Whitman)

A lonely butterfly collector wins the pools. He’s rich, he can have everything he wants – but he’s still an outsider who can’t get a girl. Surely if a woman would just get to know him he’d find love. So the easiest way of doing that is probably kidnapping the woman you had a crush on at school, locking her in a carefully furnished basement in your Tudor mansion house and just wait for her to fall in love with you. Sounds like a perfect plan right?

William Wyler’s adaptation of John Fowles’ best-selling literary first novel sees Terence Stamp as the maladjusted loner and Samantha Eggar as his victim. It’s fascinating reading about the film today and the attitudes and perceptions towards it. Today the film is chilling in the obsessive, dangerous, self-pitying self-justifications of Freddie Clegg. But in the mid-60s a number of reviewers commented on the pity they felt for the kidnapper, and even expressed that in many ways he was acting on fantasies every healthy man has had (they haven’t). Quite rightly the film comes across differently today, a far more unsettling and disturbing portrait than it did at the time.

Wyler’s direction is intimate and a fine mixture of the theatrical – with its often single locations and two-actor scenes – and cinematic, particularly in the way he subtly builds up a Hitchcockian level of tension around the possibility of discovery and escape for Miranda. Sure visually he is a little too much in love with the crash zoom on key items (chloroform for example in Freddie’s car), and devices that seem a little too obvious (like the use of black and white for the film’s only significant flashback) but he mounts the entire film with an unsettling claustrophobia that works very well.

Further he draws out two fantastic performances from the leads. Terence Stamp was not a natural choice for the shy, timid outsider turned abductor – he’s obviously way too handsome and physically assured for the role – but he marshals very well the blinded arrogance of a man who believes the whole world would march to his tune if it only stopped and listened. His Freddie Clegg is softly-spoken, polite and controlled – so much so you almost forget how insane he is. Stamp also does a remarkable physical performance, making himself seem shorter and less dynamic than he really is, his body language having more than the hint of the schoolboy about it. Domineering, controlling, bullying and totally incapable of internal analysis of his actions.

You realise watching the films events unfold – and Freddie’s inability to analyse the emotional truth behind them – that he is alone because he fundamentally doesn’t understand human relationships. While many of the (male) film reviewers at the time found this strangely tragic, today it’s hard to feel anything but contempt for his cruel self-pity.

The more difficult role falls to Samantha Eggar as Miranda. Wyler’s attempt to get the best performance from here seems pretty kin to the abduction the character goes through in the film – she was kept in isolation on the film set, Stamp was instructed to not talk to her outside of shooting while Wyler constantly held the threat of dismissal over her. More than a few echoes of Hitchcock in that – and Wyler’s praise on the film’s completion for Eggar’s (Oscar nominated and Cannes Award winning) performance as more than a whiff of self-praise to it. But Eggar herself is superb as a woman who oscillates between panic, desperation, ingratiating kindness, anger, contempt and fear. Miranda is a woman who tries everything she can to get out of this situation, only to constantly butt heads against the twin devils of her countryside isolation and Freddie’s own lack of emotional and intellectual intelligence.

Because the film interestingly makes clear what a tedious and not-very-bright monomaniacal man Freddie is, compared with the educated and quick-witted Miranda. When she tries to engage him on a discussion about modern art, he is utterly incapable of beginning to appreciate artists such as Picasso (‘It doesn’t look real’), completely fails to grasp any of the ideas in The Catcher in the Rye (the book she suggests he reads) or their relation to him, and is drawn only towards the blandest, most traditional drawings that she creates while whiling away the time in captivity. He fanatically collects butterflies, rooms lined with framed specimens that he can discuss in detail but with no concept of their beauty. Every time Miranda tries to scratch the surface of Freddie to connect with him she constantly discovers he has no depths at all, he’s a little boy lost in the world who can’t understand why he can’t collect people with the ease he catches and kills butterflies.

Whether the film has some sympathy for Freddie is less clear. Maurice Jarre’s luscious score certainly seems to suggest we should feel something for this misguided guy, but today it’s almost impossible to do so. The film works just as well without those feelings of implied sympathy though, which is a tribute to Wyler’s even-handed and controlled direction. Certainly Miranda’s fear and oppression are easy to connect with.

Is this a Stockholm syndrome film? Miranda – an intelligent and cunning woman – quickly realises that while she is the victim, Freddie’s desire to be seen as sort of chivalric gentleman does give her some power over his treatment of her – he wants her to fall in love for real with him. How much does she start to feel sympathy for this misguided loner? Is there any hint of real feeling at any point in her eventual attempt to seduce him (I doubt it heavily watching the film, but I may be adding a modern perspective, as I suspect Wyler wants to leave a hint there – again the score supports this feeling a bit)? I’m not sure – but the film’s eventual ending does leave little doubt that Freddie is a dangerous man, and the world is a less save place with him in it.

The Collector isn’t perfect – and perhaps its attitudes have dated – but it still has a real skill to it, some wonderful scenes – and two terrific performances from its lead actors, who I think have never been better than they are here. Wyler’s last success – and you can see his debt to the later work of Michael Powell and Alfred Hitchcock in each frame, even while he fails to match either of them – it still makes for an unsettling, troubling and fascinating watch.

The Children's Hour (1961)

Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine are victims of scurrilous rumours in The Children’s Hour

Director: William Wyler

Cast: Shirley MacLaine (Martha Dobie), Audrey Hepburn (Karen Wright), James Garner (Dr Joe Cardin), Miriam Hopkins (Lily Mortar), Fay Bainter (Mrs Amelia Tilford), Karen Balkin (Mary Tilford), Veronica Cartwright (Rosalie Wells), Mimi Gibson (Evelyn), William Mims (Mr Burton)

The Children’s Hour was William Wyler’s second stab at directing an adaptation of Lilian Hellman’s play of the same name: a story about two young teachers at a private girls’ school, and the destruction wreaked on their lives when a malicious pupil spreads rumours the two are in a secret lesbian relationship. His first attempt from 1936, These Three, kept as many of the themes as possible but carefully deleted every single reference to homosexuality in the script. This second film version restores this core theme in a carefully structured, well directed, respectful film adaptation that, with its careful analysis of the danger of rumours and snap judgements, still feels relevant today.

Martha Dobie (Shirley MacLaine) and Karen Wright (Audrey Hepburn) run a private girls’ school. Karen is engaged to Dr Joe Cardin (James Garner), and this prolonged engagement is part of the arsenal used by a bitter, bullying student Mary (Karen Balkin) when she decides to start spreading innuendo about a scandalous relationship between the teachers, painting Martha as consumed by sexual envy. Mary’s story is believed whole-heartedly by her grandmother, doyen of the social scene and Joe’s aunt, Amelia Tilford (Fay Bainter). Thoughtless words from Martha’s aunt Lily Mortar (Miriam Hopkins) make things worse. In no time, the school is ruined, the children all gone and Martha and Karen face a desperate battle to prove that there is nothing to this but gossip.

Wyler’s film is a strange mixture at times, in part a commentary on prejudice, and also a scorching condemnation of jumping to judgements. The film plays out all this with calmness and a general careful avoidance of histrionics and lecturing. The removal of the children from the school is brutal and cowardly – with none of the parents having the guts to say why they are doing what they are doing until finally confronted by Karen. Amelia Tilford goes about her campaign of moral righteousness with a holier-than-thou superiority while constantly stressing that she takes no pleasure in this. In the latter half of the film, the abandoned school seems to be constantly surrounded by smirking men.

The film carefully outlines that this sort of moral judgement is inherently wrong, and it brings out some true moral judgement on many of the people involved. It draws out a brilliant Crucible-like indignation at the rigidity and hypocrisy of how those who are judged to be different are treated. The film’s finest sequence is at the centre of the film, where Martha and Karen make a (failed) attempt to nip the scandal in the bud by confronting Mary at her grandmother’s house. The scene zings with a burning sense of injustice, as Mary’s lies are believed, doubled down on and then confirmed by a blackmailed fellow student, all while the audience knows that everything that is being spun is florid, innuendo-filled rubbish.

Mary is a bitter, twisted, angry little girl whose face seems permanently screwed into a furious frown. She also has the sharpness and ruthlessness of the natural bully, successfully blackmailing a sensitive, kleptomaniac student to endorse all her lies at every turn. Wyler carefully demonstrates that she has a natural manipulator’s deviance and that half-facts and muttered comments carry more conviction and force than carefully stated arguments ever would.

But Mary’s actions partly stem from Karen’s own forceful treatment of her – and Karen’s moral inflexibility and personal certainty is just one of the many character flaws that this lie brings closer and closer to the surface. Well played by Audrey Hepburn, using her occasional slight imperiousness to great effect, Karen’s lack of compromise, her domineering personality and her own moral superiority help to make her both an unsympathetic victim to many, and a person who manages to drive wedges (inadvertently) between herself and her two closest friends, Joe and Martha.

That wedge spins out from the fact that the more sensitive Martha (a sensitively delicate performance from Shirley Maclaine) does have romantic and sexual feelings for Karen, feelings that she has carefully suppressed (or perhaps not even understood) and confesses to late on in a wave of guilt and shame, mixed with an almost unspoken hope that Karen might respond to this confession with more than silence and a quiet assurance that it won’t change anything. Neither of which is what Martha wants (or needs) to hear.

MacLaine was critical of Wyler for removing from the film scenes that showed Martha’s love and affection for Karen in a romantic light. Perhaps Wyler was still slightly squeamish about the likelihood of America accepting a lesbian character presented honestly and sensitively. –But MacLaine has a point for, while the film does suggest it is reprehensible to make judgements about other people’s private lives, it falls well short of suggesting that a lesbian relationship is as normal and valid as a straight one, or that Martha’s feelings for Karen are the equal of Karen’s for Joe. Karen will let the idea slide, but she is hardly thrilled by it, meanwhile Martha is made the more passive and hysterical of the two women, and her feelings for Karen are a source of tragedy in the story. While it’s of its time, the film still shies away from the idea that a lesbian relationship could ever be without a tinge of scandal. Unlike, say, Dirk Bogarde’s gay barrister in Victim, there is always something “not quite right even if we shouldn’t judge” about homosexuality in the film.

It’s why the film is at its strongest when showcasing its outrage for the many selfish and self-appointed moral guardians who ruin lives with sanctimonious self-regard. Miriam Hopkins is eminently smackable as Martha’s appalling aunt, whose love of gossip pours fuel on the fire. Fay Bainter is very good (and Oscar nominated) as Amelia, whose reluctance and unease about her self-appointed role as the moral police, only partly tempers her rigidity and inflexibility. Words of support and encouragement from others are noticeable by their absence, and even the long-standing loyalty of Joe (a rather charming James Garner) is eventually tinged (forever for Karen) by a moment of doubt.

Rumours and innuendo are dangerous and cause real and lasting damage to people’s lives. It’s a fact the film enforces strongly – and it’s an idea that perhaps is even more relevant today at a time when social media sends moral judgements that ruin lives around the world even faster than Amelia Tilford’s phone can. A well-made film with moral force, that could have gone further, but still went further than many others dared at the time.

The Letter (1940)

Bette Davis plots doom and death in The Letter. Can she be caught?

Director: William Wyler

Cast: Bette Davis (Leslie Crosbie), Herbert Marshall (Robert Crosbie), James Stephenson (Howard Joyce), Frieda Inescort (Dorothy Joyce), Gale Sondergaard (Mrs Hammond), Bruce Lester (John Withers), Elizabeth Earl (Adele Ainsworth), Cecil Kellaway (Prescott), Sen Yung (Ong Chi Seng)

The “woman’s picture” was a popular genre of the 1940s, a catch-all for stories that centred around women dealing with domestic issues in the home or in relationships, with the lady herself the driving force of the narrative. There were several stars who excelled in this wide-ranging genre, but the best was perhaps Bette Davis. This melodrama is a superb example of exactly this sort of female-led narrative, focusing in on its heroine making catastrophic decisions that lead to terrible consequences.

On a plantation in Malaya, in the late 1930s, Leslie Crosbie (Bette Davis) the wife of gentle plantation owner Robert (Herbert Marshall) guns down a man, Geoff Hammond, who comes to visit her in her home alone. She insists to her husband, and their lawyer Howard Joyce (James Stephenson), that she was defending her honour. The trial for murder feels like a formality – until Joyce’s clerk Ong Chi Seng (Sen Yung) informs him that Hammond had a Eurasian wife (Gale Sondergaard) who has a letter from Leslie to the dead man which casts a very different light on the affair. Because “affair” is the right word: the letter implies Leslie invited the man to visit her while her husband was out. Mrs Hammond will hand the letters over to the authority – unless Leslie and Joyce cough up a huge sum of money to stop her.

The Letter is a film with two marvellous book-end scenes. The first is a beautifully shot and assembled murder sequence, where Wyler’s camera moodily pans through the sleeping native workers on the plantation – dappled by moonlight – until it finds itself drawn towards the steps of the plantation house by the sounds of gunfire. It’s a superbly marshalled sequence that mixes stillness and quiet from the start with a sudden explosion of noise, reflected in the shift in editing from slow camera movements to fast cuts. Nothing else in the film quite matches it until we reach the final sequence that mirrors it with Bette Davis heading back outside into the moonlight, where a terrible and violent surprise awaits her.

And you can enjoy that because no-one did these brutal, arrogant, high-society queens as well as Bette Davis. Davis is superb here, bringing just the right touch of melodrama to balance the intensity of Leslie’s selfish desperation to get away with what we immediately know is an act of murder. Leslie Crosbie is entitled, arch and a natural liar who carefully builds a series of alternative stories (each of them less believable than the one before) which she spins carefully with a mix of vulnerability and a dash of feminine weakness, to try and get away with murder. It’s a domineeringly strong performance that powers the entire film and Wyler draws a wonderful arch cruelty from her, just below the surface of her acceptable female hobbies of knitting and dinner planning.

Wyler balances this with the two men around her, both of whom are under her spell to different degrees. Herbert Marshall is very good as her husband, a generous, loving, naïve soul who believes his wife without question until he later realises he shouldn’t. Marshall does an excellent job with making this hen-pecked weakling intriguing, not least in his later passive-aggressive response when discovering most of his fortune has been blown to save his wife from a certain death sentence.

The other man is her lawyer Howard Joyce, played with a patrician reserve by James Stephenson. Oscar-nominated for the role, Stephenson’s Joyce doubts everything he is told from the very start, but somehow allows himself to be dragged along with the cover-up that slowly develops. Whether this is out of pride, or whether this is because he is himself somehow under some sort of erotic spell that she emits is left open to question. Either way, Stephenson puts a wonderful growing aghast horror behind the role as his professional and moral scruples are challenged more and more.

The chicanery of Davis’ character in the film is of course helped by her being white and rich, and prejudices against Hammond (not to mention the reception his Eurasian wife expects to gets if she comes forward) are most of the mainstay of the case in her defence. Joyce basically speaks platitudes about professional integrity, while all but knowingly defending a murderer (he in fact goes out of his way to give himself plausible denial and avoids questions). The film manages to present the native workers on the plantation – and Joyce’s clerk – as something a bit more than this, as perhaps the only people in the film with actual integrity.

But of course Davis gets away with it, because she can pay to do so, but the film finds other ways to punish her (as these women’s pictures usually do for adultery). The film’s final sequences see Davis’ character slowly collapse from arrogant certainty into moral and mental torture, before almost willingly marching towards certain danger. Wyler’s film is a great vehicle for her, but it’s also superbly made and shot and captures the sweaty lack of justice in the British Empire with perfection.

The Westerner (1940)

Entertaining but unspectacular Western fun as odd-couple friends turn rivals

Director: William Wyler

Cast: Gary Cooper (Cole Harden), Walter Brennan (Judge Roy Bean), Doris Davenport (Jane Ellen Matthews), Fred Stone (Caliphet Mathews), Forrest Tucker (Wade Harper), Paul Hurst (Chickenfoot), Chill Wills (Southeast), Lilian Bond (Lillie Langtry), Dana Andrews (Hod Johnson)

In 1882, Cole Harden (Gary Cooper) arrives in the town of Vinegaroon in Texas. The town is ruled by “Judge” Roy Bean (Walter Brennan), a corrupt, self-proclaimed justice of the land, who collects unfair fines and hands out “suspended sentences” (i.e. hangings). Nearly hanged, Harden escapes by peddling a story of his (fake) friendship with Lillie Langtry, the obsessive focus of Bean’s love. Over time the two men find themselves drawn to each other, forming a friendship – which is challenged by Bean’s favouring the violent cattle ranchers over the homesteaders.

The Westerner is a well-constructed, decent old-style Western that doesn’t do anything particularly radical – as if those making it needed a bit of downtime between more demanding projects, so put together something quite enjoyable to fill their time. It’s nominally a film about the clash between cowboys and homesteaders, but this plotline actually gets very little play – and is pretty unclear.

What it really is, is a sort of romance between Harden and Bean. They are two people surprisingly drawn together, who have a similar outlook on the world, and share a very natural and immediate bond. They have very real chemistry. In fact their chemistry is so strong there is barely room for anyone else to get a look in.

So the film is a sort of bromance tragedy, because of course it’s clear that they will end up on opposite sides. Because Bean has principles of control which Harden cannot allow to stand. Because the same instincts that lead Bean to champion the cowboys, are the same ones that lead Harden to champion the homesteaders. Both men think that they are basically in the right. The main difference between them is probably that, if push comes to shove, Bean would rather win than be right, while Harden is more concerned with meeting his moral standards than anything else.

Wyler brings all this together with professional crispness, shooting the action and more chamber-piece moments with skill. He draws a real playfulness from Brennan and Cooper – could many other directors have thought about including a scene where Cooper wakes up slightly confused in a bed with Brennan’s arm around him after a night of drinking? Confrontations throughout the film have a playful edge to them, even when guns are on the table. Even the final gun fight between the two has a reluctant edge to it, as if this was a game with a few more consequences than normal.

The bond between Bean and Harden is so strong, and so central to the film, that the relationship between Harden and Jane Ellen Mathews never quite clicks into gear. There is a charming scene where Cooper (with an honest flirtatiousness) cuts a lock of Jane Ellen’s hair – but the film isn’t really interested in this relationship. It feels like it exists for plot and scripting reasons – that the writers felt a romantic plot was needed, and wanted to give Harden a very clear personal motivation above and beyond his sense of justice. Doris Davenport is fine as Jane Ellen, but it’s not a performance you really remember.

Gary Cooper is rather good as Cole Harden, despite his reluctance to do the film. Cooper identified that Brennan had the best role and the best lines, and felt that he would actually be playing the support rather than the lead. Contractual obligation got him into the film. And it’s a good thing, as Cooper is actually very good. He has a light comedic touch which you don’t often associate with him, which he matches with his upright honesty and unflinching decency. But there is a playful grin behind his eyes throughout, and you get a real sense of his conflicting loyalties.

But Cooper was right – Judge Roy Bean is the role in this film, and Walter Brennan (who won his third supporting actor Oscar in five years for this) is quite simply terrific. His Bean is a wily, slightly crooked, maverick bully with a warped sense of personal justice – but he’s also a charming, rather sweet old man with a tough streak. The script gives a lot of focus to Bean’s obsessive love for the actress Lillie Langtry, which not only humanises him, but turns someone who we first see carrying out a ruthless judicial murder into some sort of teenage, love-struck rogue. That’s the genius here – Bean could be awful, but actually we (like Harden) end up loving him. Brennan’s effortlessly charismatic performance is central here – he is terrific in the role.

Take away these performances though and you probably only have flashes here and there of class alongside. Scenes are well constructed, and the entire film is very well filmed by the great Gregg Toland, but it’s very much a solid piece of professional work rather than a great classic. Brennan is brilliant and Cooper impressive, but not much more of the rest of the film really settles into the memory.