William Wyler Read Free

as the forces of repression gather against them.
    The Love Trap was made in both a silent version and a 25 percent sound version. The latter features a musical score and synchronized sound in the final sequences, including the overly long confrontation between Evelyn and the judge. Because of the actors’ evident difficulty in making the transition to sound, what is supposed to be a comic sequence seems even more melodramatic, which, unfortunately, magnifies Wyler's struggle to keep the scene light and comic.
    Following the completion of The Love Trap , Wyler was asked to shoot some special scenes of La Plante in Spanish for a film exposition in Barcelona. Then Carl Laemmle Jr. (known as Junior), who was now the general manager of his father's studio, asked Wyler to direct an installment of The Cohens and the Kellys in Scotland , which he refused to do because he did not like the story. This was just the first of many times that Wyler stood up to a producer when he disliked the material he was offered. In a letter to his parents, he was already displaying the temperament of an artist: “I probably would be considered of the large army of ingrates who got their starts with Carl Laemmle and then left him. But I don't want to sacrifice my future for the past.” 5
    Wyler's refusal to listen to Junior almost cost him his next project, Hell's Heroes —a film that would display Wyler's considerable gifts and allow him to impose his own vision on the material. Fortunately, Junior decided to sublimate his anger for the good of a project he had great confidence in. Recognizing that Wyler had brought a touch of class to both The Shakedown and The Love Trap , he decided to assign The Cohens and the Kellys to William Craft and let Wyler direct Hell's Heroes . It would not be the last time the director's intransigence netted him superior material.
    Hell's Heroes was a coup for Wyler, since it was to be Universal's first all-sound film and would require considerable outdoor location filming. Wyler later recalled the complications involved in making the film:
    It was made under tremendous difficulties because the camera had to be muffled in the padded booth with a soundproof window in front and a padded door in the back. Of course, George Robinson, the cameraman, was stuffed into the booth with the camera. Since the story had the men fleeing or trying to reach salvation, I couldn't very well have them stop all the time to declaim.
    They were fugitives and had to move even when they spoke. So, we had to devise moving shots with dialogue. That meant putting the padded boxes on rails. Just imagine a dozen guys pushing this padded shack on rails in Death Valley in August in absolute silence. Microphones were concealed in cactus and sagebrush every ten feet or so. 6
    The film was based on a novel, The Three Godfathers (1913), by Peter B. Kyne, a writer of popular fiction whose work appeared regularly in magazines such as Collier's , the Saturday Evening Post , and Sunset . The novel, a retelling of the Gospel according to Matthew set on the nineteenth-century American frontier, had already been filmed twice before in silent versions—in 1916 by Edward J. Le Saint (starring Harry Carey) and in 1919 by Wyler's friend John Ford as Marked Men (also starring Carey). It would be remade twice after Wyler's version—by Richard Boleslawski in 1936 (starring Chester Morris, Walter Brennan, and Lewis Stone) and by Ford again in 1948, in Technicolor, as Three Godfathers (starring John Wayne, Pedro Armendariz, and Harry Carey Jr.; Carey Sr. had died a year earlier). Later in their careers, Ford would often joke that it was now Wyler's turn to remake The Three Godfathers .
    Kyne's novel begins with four outlaws holding up a bank in Arizona. As they flee, one is killed and another, Tom Gibbons, is wounded. The three survivors manage to make it to California, and after resting, they decide their best course is to head for a water hole