This is not a film (blog): Taught by masters
The Criterion Collection is the film equivalent of the Library of America, curating the best of the past and preserving it in pristine digital editions. Their latest release, The Heiress, is a good excuse for writing about William Wyler's greatest film, maybe the greatest film of everyone involved.
I don't know if Henry James could be considered a feminist, but he understood the inner lives of women who are genteelly abused by men, which underlies his novel Washington Square. Austen Sloper is a successful doctor who disdains his daughter Catherine because she is not beautiful and brilliant like his wife -- or his memory of his wife -- who died giving birth to her. Education has not improved her in his eyes; she can neither play the piano nor make intelligent conversation. But she is far from dull, with a sharp wit she exercises out of his hearing. Sloper is perhaps even more contemptuous of his widowed sister Lavinia, whose presence in the house he tolerates in the hope that her social skills will rub off on Catherine. (When he diagnoses his illness as terminal, he tells Catherine, "I don't want your aunt in my room unless I should go into a coma.") The doctor's brutality is completely emotional, and so subtle that Catherine is not even aware of it until the film's wrenching climax. Ralph Richardson's astonishing performance was too subtle for the Motion Picture Academy, who managed to overlook it while awarding Best Actress to Olivia DeHavilland.
Not that she doesn't completely deserve it. She had help from the hair and makeup artists, but it was finally up to her to convey Catherine's plainness. Hollywood frequently called on beautiful women to play homely characters, DeHavilland's sister Joan Fontaine as Jane Eyre being another example. (Nothing has changed: Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino were cast as the waitress and the short-order cook in Frankie and Johnny, roles originated on the stage by Kathy Bates and F. Murray Abraham.) The anxiety in her eyes every time her father addresses her is painful to watch, especially when she asks him "to praise me, a little" to Morris, the man she loves. Clearly he has never praised her.
Morris Townsend is a cad on the make who would be unbearable (and uninteresting) without the beauty of Montgomery Clift. At the engagement party where they meet, you feel he must have shaken off half the women present to home in on Catherine, the gawky girl with the money who has been abandoned by her dancing partner. In convincing her she is the woman of his dreams, he almost convinces us. And Townsend is another gentle abuser of women, as Sloper intuits -- he lives with his widowed sister and teaches French to her children, but has not spent a dollar of his inheritance to help with the groceries. He seems proud that he has not exceeded the inheritance, either, and has returned from Europe without debts. Also without prospects for employment, but when you look like that...He seduces Catherine, and he seduces us. He's less successful at seducing Sloper, though he tries.
Could Morris, who loves expensive gloves and good clothes, possibly love Catherine? The doctor can't believe it and tries to "protect" her. He asks for time and takes her to Europe, trying to re-capture the bliss of his honeymoon trip. Finally back in the handsome house, he rattles off a list (clearly long suppressed) of her shortcomings, her inability to master any skill save one: "You embroider neatly." Richardson's words are bullets, and they all find their target. This is not a movie for the family to enjoy on Fathers Day. Catherine's subsequent preparation to elope with Morris, who jilts her, is a footnote. She has already been destroyed.
"You embroider neatly." That has always bothered me. Countless critics have cited it as an example of Catherine's empty existence, or wondered what she is thinking as she "stabs" the fabric. The problem is, it isn't embroidery, it's needlepoint. Embroidery is an art. There are countless stitches and fabrics which can be combined in marvelous ways by a skilled needlewoman (usually). The Bayeux Tapestry is not a tapestry, it's a masterpiece of eleventh-century embroidery. Needlepoint involves a pattern or picture painted on a piece of canvas mesh and attached to a frame, and you use a blunt needle to work the picture in yarn, up and down, over and over, the same stitch, picking out the alphabet (in this case) or some quotation from the Bible. It's painting by numbers, for those who remember that fad. It's a way of passing the time that leaves plenty of space for thought. That is what Catherine is doing while she discusses her father's will, and what she is doing while she waits for Morris to return at the end of the film. That she decides, "I will never do another" is a tiny flicker of hope. Can she be so cruel? her aunt wonders. Yes. "I was taught by masters." Cruelty is the quality of her selfish father and her feckless suitor. It does not have to be hers any more.
I don't know if Henry James could be considered a feminist, but he understood the inner lives of women who are genteelly abused by men, which underlies his novel Washington Square. Austen Sloper is a successful doctor who disdains his daughter Catherine because she is not beautiful and brilliant like his wife -- or his memory of his wife -- who died giving birth to her. Education has not improved her in his eyes; she can neither play the piano nor make intelligent conversation. But she is far from dull, with a sharp wit she exercises out of his hearing. Sloper is perhaps even more contemptuous of his widowed sister Lavinia, whose presence in the house he tolerates in the hope that her social skills will rub off on Catherine. (When he diagnoses his illness as terminal, he tells Catherine, "I don't want your aunt in my room unless I should go into a coma.") The doctor's brutality is completely emotional, and so subtle that Catherine is not even aware of it until the film's wrenching climax. Ralph Richardson's astonishing performance was too subtle for the Motion Picture Academy, who managed to overlook it while awarding Best Actress to Olivia DeHavilland.
Not that she doesn't completely deserve it. She had help from the hair and makeup artists, but it was finally up to her to convey Catherine's plainness. Hollywood frequently called on beautiful women to play homely characters, DeHavilland's sister Joan Fontaine as Jane Eyre being another example. (Nothing has changed: Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino were cast as the waitress and the short-order cook in Frankie and Johnny, roles originated on the stage by Kathy Bates and F. Murray Abraham.) The anxiety in her eyes every time her father addresses her is painful to watch, especially when she asks him "to praise me, a little" to Morris, the man she loves. Clearly he has never praised her.
Morris Townsend is a cad on the make who would be unbearable (and uninteresting) without the beauty of Montgomery Clift. At the engagement party where they meet, you feel he must have shaken off half the women present to home in on Catherine, the gawky girl with the money who has been abandoned by her dancing partner. In convincing her she is the woman of his dreams, he almost convinces us. And Townsend is another gentle abuser of women, as Sloper intuits -- he lives with his widowed sister and teaches French to her children, but has not spent a dollar of his inheritance to help with the groceries. He seems proud that he has not exceeded the inheritance, either, and has returned from Europe without debts. Also without prospects for employment, but when you look like that...He seduces Catherine, and he seduces us. He's less successful at seducing Sloper, though he tries.
Could Morris, who loves expensive gloves and good clothes, possibly love Catherine? The doctor can't believe it and tries to "protect" her. He asks for time and takes her to Europe, trying to re-capture the bliss of his honeymoon trip. Finally back in the handsome house, he rattles off a list (clearly long suppressed) of her shortcomings, her inability to master any skill save one: "You embroider neatly." Richardson's words are bullets, and they all find their target. This is not a movie for the family to enjoy on Fathers Day. Catherine's subsequent preparation to elope with Morris, who jilts her, is a footnote. She has already been destroyed.
"You embroider neatly." That has always bothered me. Countless critics have cited it as an example of Catherine's empty existence, or wondered what she is thinking as she "stabs" the fabric. The problem is, it isn't embroidery, it's needlepoint. Embroidery is an art. There are countless stitches and fabrics which can be combined in marvelous ways by a skilled needlewoman (usually). The Bayeux Tapestry is not a tapestry, it's a masterpiece of eleventh-century embroidery. Needlepoint involves a pattern or picture painted on a piece of canvas mesh and attached to a frame, and you use a blunt needle to work the picture in yarn, up and down, over and over, the same stitch, picking out the alphabet (in this case) or some quotation from the Bible. It's painting by numbers, for those who remember that fad. It's a way of passing the time that leaves plenty of space for thought. That is what Catherine is doing while she discusses her father's will, and what she is doing while she waits for Morris to return at the end of the film. That she decides, "I will never do another" is a tiny flicker of hope. Can she be so cruel? her aunt wonders. Yes. "I was taught by masters." Cruelty is the quality of her selfish father and her feckless suitor. It does not have to be hers any more.
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 4:06 PM
2 Comments:
Yes yes, all you say is true, but Washington Square is also a tribute to the courage of Katherine, who at the end turns her back on the adventurer who jilted her. She closes the door on him and in effect embraces the emptiness of her own house when her jilting suitor, himself jilted by another woman, tries to return to her at the end.
Katherine could compromise and accept the life that would inevitably lead her to a socially acceptable form of what we today recognize as victimhood. Instead, she chooses to be a — I believe the awful word in those days was "spinster" — keeping her pride and independence at the cost of being alone for the rest of her life.
Yours crankily,
-The New York Crank
I think the New York Crank makes a very strong point. Katherine listens to Morris pounding on the door and doesn't flinch; she makes herself listen and refuses to be drawn, and at last Dr. Sloper begins to grasp her strength of will and (as I recall Richardson's performance) seems to shrink in stature and self-importance. de Havilland is magnificent in that scene. I also want to mention two other brilliant William Wyler films about the same time: "Sister Carrie" and "The Letter." Watch The Letter" and observe how he uses space--the "native quarter," the colonial house, and the danger zone in between--as a metaphor for the racial hierarchy of colonial Malaya. Notice that Bette Davis shoots her lover outside the front door, not inside the house; notice that she leaves the compound to meet her final destiny. I love that movie. (Note the way the Chinese law clerk's tiny putt-putt car is a metaphor for his status: he's a striver, still subordinate, still faintly ridiculous in the eyes of the white folk, but with a key role to play as intermediary between inside and out. Wyler made some god-awful crap in later years but those three movies are as good as anything the studio system ever produced.
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