The Heiress: De Havilland for the Gold

 

The Heiress (1949)

Directed by William Wyler

Paramount, 115 minutes, Not Rated.

★★★★★

 

 

 

When I rewatched The Heiress, I initially gave it four stars. It stuck with me and I upgraded to a five. Reconsideration is par for the course for this William Wyler film. It got a tepid reception when it first came out and lost money. Numerous critics, however, heaped praise upon it and at Oscar time it got more nominations than any other film. Olivia de Havilland took away the hardware for Best Actress and it is now considered one of the best films of Hollywood’s classic era.

 

The film version was based on a 1947 play–a favorite undertaking of Wyler’s who did this a dozen times–but both play and movie are based on the Henry James novel Washington Square. That might have had something to do with box office hesitation, as conventional wisdom held that James’ novels were unfilmable. Wyler noted, though, that “the emotional conflict between two people in a drawing room can be as exciting as a gun battle….” Wyler stuck to his guns, as it were.

 

The Heiress is about a woman, Catharine Sloper (de Havilland), who learns to stand up for herself and become the mistress of her destiny, her toxic family notwithstanding. She is the only child of the widowed Dr. Austin Sloper (Ralph Richardson), who bullies and belittles Catharine. As she enters womanhood, she looks mousy, is painfully shy, and accepts her father’s assessment that she is ugly, dull, and unintellectual. Her aunt, Lavinia Penniman (Miriam Hopkins), sometimes takes her side, but she’s more

meddlesome than effective, an unwitting contagonist in Catharine’s desire to break her father’s iron will.

 

That desire comes in the form of Morris Townshend (Montgomery Clift), a dashing but poor man who pays attention to Catharine and tells her she’s none of the things her father claims she is. Catharine falls deeply in love with him and he proposes. Dr. Sloper refuses to give his consent; in his mind, Townshend is just a gold digger trying to get his hands on Catharine’s eventual inheritance. Is he right? Was it the right thing to do to convince Catharine to put off her plans, go to Europe to learn about culture and gain sophistication?

 

The Heiress is often as barbed and insidious as the (not-so) good doctor. At one point Catharine is accused of being uncharitable. She replies, “Yes, I can be cruel. I’ve been taught by masters.” Don’t bet on anything resolving the way paint-by-the-numbers drama romances do. This is a film of betrayal, comeuppances, insults, denied forgiveness, and lots of psychological tension. It ends with a score-evening moment that is at once apropos, mercenary, and revenge served cool and cold.

 

Cinematographer Leo Tolver worked closely with Wyler to make the Slopers’ Washington Square posh home alluring in a covetous way, yet also a claustrophobic prison. They did so with adroit mixes of short and long shots that suggest that the lens is a personified voyeur. The two also manipulate black and white tones in ways suggestive of a film noir crime flick. Though no one literally dies in The Heiress, psychological slayings occur.

 

Each of the three principal actors is brilliant. De Havilland is chameleonic in her three transformations (naïve, dawning wisdom, caustic). Her Oscar harks back to the days in which they were doled out for truly outstanding performance, not popularity and name recognition. Apparently she and Clift couldn’t stand each other on the set, but they mesh on the screen. His performance so deftly walked the balance between sincerely and conmanship that in the end there is room for doubt over whether he was indeed a grifter or a man overcome by circumstance. Richardson is easy to hate, though the deeper you dig, the more you come to see that he is damaged goods. That, however, could be the tagline for just about anyone in this film.

 

The Heiress is thus neither a poor little rich girl film, a take-that revenge fantasy, or a triumph of right over wrong. When your grandparents say they don’t films like this anymore, this is the sort of thing they mean!

 

Rob Weir