• Home
  • About
    • Straight Up
    • Jan Herman
    • Contact
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

This ‘Auteur’ Made Some of Hollywood’s Best Films

July 15, 2013 by Jan Herman


William Wyler

I just caught a screening of “Dodsworth” at the New York Historical Society, where Catherine Wyler mentioned in a pre-screening interview with AMERICAN MASTERS creator Susan Lacy that there are two new Wyler books due out soon: one by Gabriel Miller, the other by Neil Sinyard. She hoped it signals renewed interest in her father’s work. I hope she’s right. It might even give a boost to sales of my Wyler biography A Talent for Trouble, which was published back in 1996. (Miraculously, the paperback is still in print. Here’s the NY Times review.)


Jules Feiffer

Although he was –and still is — one of Hollywood’s greatest directors, Wyler’s reputation ran into tough sledding from some weighty critics who thought him insufficiently auteurist. In recent years he’s taken an especially nasty beating from David Thomson, whose anti-Wyler rants are leftovers from the ancient mutterings of Andrew Sarris.

I prefer the Wyler lampoon by Jules Feiffer in a cartoon strip that ran in the debut issue of The New York Review of Books. (The contents of Vol. 1 No. 1, published Feb. 1, 1963, are pretty fabulous: F.W. Dupee on James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time; Mary McCarthy on William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch; Norman Mailer on Morley Callaghan’s That Summer in Paris; along with other reviews by Gore Vidal, William Styron, W.H. Auden, Susan Sontag, Dwight MacDonald, John Berryman, an essay by Elizabeth Hardwick, poems by Robert Lowell, Robert Penn Warren, Adrienne Rich … OK, I’ll stop there.)


Cartoon strip © 1963 by Jules Feiffer. Click to enlarge.

By dropping Wyler’s name into a cartoon strip in The New York Review of Books, Feiffer tells us something about Wyler’s status in those days, especially when he’s mentioned in connection with Monica Vitti. (As coolly sexy as they come but not big box office, she was the thinking man’s arthouse actress: three Antonioni films — bang, bang, bang: L’Avventura, La Notte, L’Eclise, ’60, ’61, ’62 — and another for Pasolini.) Maybe the anti-Wyler screed hadn’t congealed yet. Or if it had, it hadn’t clouded Feiffer’s judgment. The fact that he names Wyler to send up “these Hollywood people” is a putdown to cherish.

Wyler often made light of the criticism that Sarris engendered. He could afford to. In France, where auteurist theory originated, Wyler was fêted at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival as one of the world’s five most distinguished directors, alongside Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, and René Clair. But it’s clear the criticism pained him. You can sense that from his remarks when he was honored by the American Film Institute, in 1976, with its Lifetime Achievement Award.

Wyler quipped that in his retirement he had taken up making home movies. “It’s a case of a professional turned amateur,” he said. Unfortunately, his family showed “no appreciation for the out-of-focus and overexposed shots that would make some critics jump for joy.” In other words, if anyone missed the joke, he had become something of an auteur.

One of the grandest ironies in all of this is that Wyler’s belief in commercial success, for which he was pilloried, is no different from the view of that ur-auteurist Orson Welles. As Diane Jacobs correctly noted in her Talent for Trouble review, Wyler “was not content with even his best movies … unless they made money.” Now we see, according to a new book edited by Peter Biskind, My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, that that’s what Welles believed. “Essentially,” he told Jaglom, “I don’t believe in a film that isn’t a commercial success. Film is a popular art form.”

Share on email
Email
Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on reddit
Reddit

Filed Under: Art, Media, Movies

Jan Herman

When not listening to Bach or Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, or dancing to salsa, I like to play jazz piano -- but only in the privacy of my own mind.
Another strange fact... Read More…

About

My Books

Several books of poems have been published in recent years by Moloko Print, Statdlichter Presse, Phantom Outlaw Editions, and Cold Turkey … [Read More...]

Straight Up

The agenda is just what it says: news of arts, media & culture delivered with attitude. Or as Rock Hudson once said in a movie: "Man is the only … [Read More...]

Contact me

We're cutting down on spam. Please fill in this form. … [Read More...]

Archives

Blogroll

Abstract City
AC Institute
ACKER AWARDS New York
All Things Allen Ginsberg
Antiwar.com
arkivmusic.com
Artbook&
Arts & Letters Daily

Befunky
Bellaart
Blogcritics
Booknotes
Bright Lights Film Journal

C-SPAN
Noam Chomsky
Consortium News
Cost of War
Council on Foreign Relations
Crooks and Liars
Cultural Daily

The Daily Howler
Dark Roasted Blend
DCReport
Deep L
Democracy Now!

Tim Ellis: Comedy
Eschaton

Film Threat
Robert Fisk
Flixnosh (David Elliott’s movie menu)
Fluxlist Europe

Good Reads
The Guardian
GUERNICA: A Magazine of Art & Politics

Herman (Literary) Archive, Northwestern Univ. Library
The Huffington Post

Inter Press Service News Agency
The Intercept
Internet Archive (WayBackMachine)
Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
Doug Ireland
IT: International Times, The Magazine of Resistance

Jacketmagazine
Clive James

Kanopy (stream free movies, via participating library or university)
Henry Kisor
Paul Krugman

Lannan Foundation
Los Angeles Times

Metacritic
Mimeo Mimeo
Moloko Print
Movie Geeks United (MGU)
MGU: The Kubrick Series

National Security Archive
The New York Times
NO!art

Osborne & Conant
The Overgrown Path

Poets House
Political Irony
Poynter

Quanta Magazine

Rain Taxi
The Raw Story
RealityStudio.org
Bill Reed
Rhizome
Rwanda Project

Salon
Senses of Cinema
Seven Stories Press
Slate
Stadtlichter Presse
Studs Terkel
The Synergic Theater

Talking Points Memo (TPM)
TalkLeft
The 3rd Page
Third Mind Books
Times Square Cam
The Tin Man
t r u t h o u t

Ubu Web

Vox

The Wall Street Journal
Wikigate
Wikipedia
The Washington Post
The Wayback Machine (Internet Archive)
World Catalogue
World Newspapers, Magazines & News Sites

The XD Agency

Share on email
Email
Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on reddit
Reddit
This blog published under a Creative Commons license

an ArtsJournal blog

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

 

Loading Comments...