Posted: Fri Aug 25, 2006 9:31 pm
Just wanted to share my thoughts on this film, which was brought to my attention by Gary Tooze at DVDBeaver (and features a brief comment on one of his complaints about the film):
In lesser hands, 1956's Friendly Persuasion would no doubt have been a melodromatic, sentimental fantasy. That somehow William Wyler makes the film work is not only a testament to the strength of Wyler's directorial skill, but also proof that Wyler deserves the auteur status that has been given to some of his Hollywood peers, most famously Howard Hawks, championed by the Cahiers crowd in the 1960s. Wyler deserves the title, not only because he exhibited a large degree of control over his projects, but because, like many of the greatest directors, his films display a unique visual style, and his stories nearly all feature a recurring thematic motif. That his visual style is indeed the very absence of visual flourishes should not bother the auteurist critics. That he would sacrifice such visual flourishes in his unwavering committment to his stories, many of which revolved around domestic conflicts, is evidence of Wyler's mastery of the medium, resulting in a lyrical cinema stripped of its pretentions and complications.
Wyler begins his opening scene with a narration by Little Jess (Richard Eyer), accompanying it with images of his mother's (Dorothy McGuire) pet goose, the subject of his narration. This opening sequence is initially perplexing, but when viewed in the context of the rest of the picture, it is illuminating rather than banal. Like much of the rest of the film's first hour, this sequence has a deceptively light tone. By filming Little Jess' act of small violence as comedy, Wyler acknowledges that simple acts of violence can contain a perverted sense of humor, and it's almost a knowing dig at the audience who laughs right along with him. That we find this and other acts of "wholesome" violence throughout the picture humorous, demonstrates Wyler's success. What once appeared trivial and almost too playfully absurd, appears at the end a microcosm of the film's message.
Little Jess and the rest of his family are Quakers, and thus are morally and philosophically opposed to violence of any kind. With the film's very first scene, Wyler demonstrates not only how impossible it is to live a life free from violence, no matter how trivial, but also the conflicts and consequences that violence of all kinds will bring to the Birdwell family. Wyler does not pause and ask his audience whether they understand this. He know that they don't and that they won't until the picture is over. By depicting this short scene between Little Jess and the animal, Wyler makes us ask all sorts of troubling questions. How is it possible to live a life free from violence? Is that even possible at all? Should we ever compromise our moral values for what we believe is a just cause? Can violence ever be justified? While the picture offers us no definitive solutions, it does offer us several possible answers.
Wyler builds and builds these sequences of small violence, until they're lurking so near to the surface that they quite literally explode into the violence of the Civil War, a kind of violence that is completely unavoidable. When the Birdwell family travels to the local fair, every imaginable kind of temptation is on display. Jess (Gary Cooper) takes up a game at the shooting gallery, and later gets caught up with a persuasive organ salesman (Walter Catlett). Little Jess unwittingly helps out a group of gamblers, while his sister Martha (Phyllis Love) dances with her suitor, Gardner Jordan (Peter Mark Richman). Even their mother can be seen tapping her foot to the rhythms of the dance music. It is ironic that only naive, torn Josh (Anthony Perkins) is able to resist temptation, taking blows to the face from a group of angry gamblers, without so much as lifting a finger to defend himself. It's his father that uses physical force to free him from both pain and humiliation.
The second half of the picture is devoted to these contradictory actions and emotions of the Birdwell family, particularly Josh, as it is nearly torn apart by the ravages of the Civil War. The question that faces the family is simple: how do they justify their pacifism when Confederate soldiers could at any minute tear the family apart? It's ironic, Wyler persuasively argues, that the moral dilemma is what nearly destroys them, but it's the family's willingness to accept Josh's decision to fight that keeps them together. Indeed, Josh's dilemma is yet another microcosm of the film's overarching dramatic arc. Perkins brings to the character a shy warmth, while Wyler visually accentuates his lanky frame, humbling him, but showing the internal conflict that is eating at his soul.
When the matriarch and Quaker preacher Eliza also succombs to violence in a fit of rage, both she and the audience realize that living a philosophy and believing it are two totally different things. Her husband however, never neglects his committment to his ideals when they are most direly tested. In a masterfully realized sequence, Wyler draws our sympathy when Jess discovers his dying friend Sam (Rob Middleton), but he then reverses our emotions.
In this sequence, a Confederate soldier grazes Jess with a bullet. Believing him dead, the soldier comes over to examine the body. Framing this scene in long shot, Wyler directs our anger to the slowly approaching soldier and through is mise-en-scene, focuses our attention on the faking Jess and the rifle that lay next to him. We desperately want Jess to spring up and kill the soldier, but Wyler takes the scene in an entirely different direction. When Jess indeed does surprise the soldier, he refuses to kill him. Wyler here shows us a close up of the soldier's face, a mixture of both surprise, fear, and disbelief. Wyler has taken our calousness, our desire to see the soldier dead, and throws it back in our face. Jess' nobility is so stunning because it's so surprising, so true, and so perfectly realized.
I read one review which remarked that there were several scenes were passages of minor violence go apparently unnoticed and unpunished, where violence is answered with more violence. I would be quick to add that while it's true that the violence might indeed go unnoticed it does not go unpunished. The punishment is the guilt that each family member feels and that each pushes upon one another. How can you live with yourself when you are in continuous violation of your own moral code? While Josh's morals, his sense of what is right, is at odds with his faith, he'd be unable to live with himself if he hadn't fought for what he belived was just. Likewise, his father would have never been able to live down the guilt he'd have felt had he killed the Confederate soldier. While the smaller acts of violence don't wreck nearly as much personal and familial havoc, they nevertheless put a strain on each and every member of the family. Wyler begins Friendly Persuasion with what seems to be a black-and-white morality, but ends the film with troubling shades of gray.
In lesser hands, 1956's Friendly Persuasion would no doubt have been a melodromatic, sentimental fantasy. That somehow William Wyler makes the film work is not only a testament to the strength of Wyler's directorial skill, but also proof that Wyler deserves the auteur status that has been given to some of his Hollywood peers, most famously Howard Hawks, championed by the Cahiers crowd in the 1960s. Wyler deserves the title, not only because he exhibited a large degree of control over his projects, but because, like many of the greatest directors, his films display a unique visual style, and his stories nearly all feature a recurring thematic motif. That his visual style is indeed the very absence of visual flourishes should not bother the auteurist critics. That he would sacrifice such visual flourishes in his unwavering committment to his stories, many of which revolved around domestic conflicts, is evidence of Wyler's mastery of the medium, resulting in a lyrical cinema stripped of its pretentions and complications.
Wyler begins his opening scene with a narration by Little Jess (Richard Eyer), accompanying it with images of his mother's (Dorothy McGuire) pet goose, the subject of his narration. This opening sequence is initially perplexing, but when viewed in the context of the rest of the picture, it is illuminating rather than banal. Like much of the rest of the film's first hour, this sequence has a deceptively light tone. By filming Little Jess' act of small violence as comedy, Wyler acknowledges that simple acts of violence can contain a perverted sense of humor, and it's almost a knowing dig at the audience who laughs right along with him. That we find this and other acts of "wholesome" violence throughout the picture humorous, demonstrates Wyler's success. What once appeared trivial and almost too playfully absurd, appears at the end a microcosm of the film's message.
Little Jess and the rest of his family are Quakers, and thus are morally and philosophically opposed to violence of any kind. With the film's very first scene, Wyler demonstrates not only how impossible it is to live a life free from violence, no matter how trivial, but also the conflicts and consequences that violence of all kinds will bring to the Birdwell family. Wyler does not pause and ask his audience whether they understand this. He know that they don't and that they won't until the picture is over. By depicting this short scene between Little Jess and the animal, Wyler makes us ask all sorts of troubling questions. How is it possible to live a life free from violence? Is that even possible at all? Should we ever compromise our moral values for what we believe is a just cause? Can violence ever be justified? While the picture offers us no definitive solutions, it does offer us several possible answers.
Wyler builds and builds these sequences of small violence, until they're lurking so near to the surface that they quite literally explode into the violence of the Civil War, a kind of violence that is completely unavoidable. When the Birdwell family travels to the local fair, every imaginable kind of temptation is on display. Jess (Gary Cooper) takes up a game at the shooting gallery, and later gets caught up with a persuasive organ salesman (Walter Catlett). Little Jess unwittingly helps out a group of gamblers, while his sister Martha (Phyllis Love) dances with her suitor, Gardner Jordan (Peter Mark Richman). Even their mother can be seen tapping her foot to the rhythms of the dance music. It is ironic that only naive, torn Josh (Anthony Perkins) is able to resist temptation, taking blows to the face from a group of angry gamblers, without so much as lifting a finger to defend himself. It's his father that uses physical force to free him from both pain and humiliation.
The second half of the picture is devoted to these contradictory actions and emotions of the Birdwell family, particularly Josh, as it is nearly torn apart by the ravages of the Civil War. The question that faces the family is simple: how do they justify their pacifism when Confederate soldiers could at any minute tear the family apart? It's ironic, Wyler persuasively argues, that the moral dilemma is what nearly destroys them, but it's the family's willingness to accept Josh's decision to fight that keeps them together. Indeed, Josh's dilemma is yet another microcosm of the film's overarching dramatic arc. Perkins brings to the character a shy warmth, while Wyler visually accentuates his lanky frame, humbling him, but showing the internal conflict that is eating at his soul.
When the matriarch and Quaker preacher Eliza also succombs to violence in a fit of rage, both she and the audience realize that living a philosophy and believing it are two totally different things. Her husband however, never neglects his committment to his ideals when they are most direly tested. In a masterfully realized sequence, Wyler draws our sympathy when Jess discovers his dying friend Sam (Rob Middleton), but he then reverses our emotions.
In this sequence, a Confederate soldier grazes Jess with a bullet. Believing him dead, the soldier comes over to examine the body. Framing this scene in long shot, Wyler directs our anger to the slowly approaching soldier and through is mise-en-scene, focuses our attention on the faking Jess and the rifle that lay next to him. We desperately want Jess to spring up and kill the soldier, but Wyler takes the scene in an entirely different direction. When Jess indeed does surprise the soldier, he refuses to kill him. Wyler here shows us a close up of the soldier's face, a mixture of both surprise, fear, and disbelief. Wyler has taken our calousness, our desire to see the soldier dead, and throws it back in our face. Jess' nobility is so stunning because it's so surprising, so true, and so perfectly realized.
I read one review which remarked that there were several scenes were passages of minor violence go apparently unnoticed and unpunished, where violence is answered with more violence. I would be quick to add that while it's true that the violence might indeed go unnoticed it does not go unpunished. The punishment is the guilt that each family member feels and that each pushes upon one another. How can you live with yourself when you are in continuous violation of your own moral code? While Josh's morals, his sense of what is right, is at odds with his faith, he'd be unable to live with himself if he hadn't fought for what he belived was just. Likewise, his father would have never been able to live down the guilt he'd have felt had he killed the Confederate soldier. While the smaller acts of violence don't wreck nearly as much personal and familial havoc, they nevertheless put a strain on each and every member of the family. Wyler begins Friendly Persuasion with what seems to be a black-and-white morality, but ends the film with troubling shades of gray.
. But PERSUASION was the one film of Wyler which made me really suffer, that's why I launched my attack. Wasn't personal.
. The same tendencies run through all these films especially the tendency to withdraw into closed rooms and to carefully group the characters in room. I could make screenshots all day for certain scenes and you can exactly see how Wyler composes the scenes like a ballet. I think he's arguably the best director in such matters. there's an unerring eye to arrange his characters sometimes aided by Toland's compositions, but it works also without him. Check the overlong closeups in DODSWORTH and THE HEIRESS or teh arrangement of people in HOUR as the trio visits the older lady to confront them about the rumours and how Wyler manages to arrange them effortlessly into telling compositions.
. Cukor directorial abilities go towards zero. No camera instinct, tasteful filmer of oh so very much tasteful and acclaimed literature and surprisingly mediocre actor's director.