MODERNISM IN THE PAST — REMINISCENCES

William Wyler’s Humanism (1960)

An essay, published in 1960, on the William Wyler’s thematic preoccupation’s with essential ethical issues and his »discrete« stylistic procedure is based on the analysis of three Wyler’s films: Detective Story, The Big Country, The Friendly Persuasion.

William Wyler is marked by the fame that »he cannot make a bad film«, and the fame is not unfounded. He made films in a variety of genres: social drama, love tragedy, detective story, love comedy, historical spectacle, western. And he made very few mistakes at that — his films were at worst of medium value, mostly of highest artistic value. In the three films chosen for analysis, Wyler conveyed in a deep and artistically impressive manner a comment on some decisive and great problems of contemporary life, primarily ethical ones (a destructiveness of a dogmatic separation of the world into the good and the bad with nothing inbetween in Detective story; the question of inherent violence and its higher conscientious and social control in The Big Country and Friendly Persuasion). Wyler tended toward spiritualized realism, which was not only manifested in the choice of authentic and convincing ambiences, or in candid and subtle acting (actors are at the best in Wyler’s films) but most of all in the vivacity of characters and in the importance of human problems the characters were the vehicles of. Wyler was one of the rare contemporary film artists in whose works big and powerful personalities still did important things.

Hrvoje Lisinski