The Heiress ('49)

Plot Summary

In 1840's New York Catherine lives with her father, Dr. Sloper, a physician. Her mother died some years before, and Dr. Sloper still idolizes her. He never misses an opportunity to compare his daughter to her -- a comparison the daughter cannot win. When Morris Townsend, a handsome but penniless young man, comes along and woos and wins his daughter's heart, Dr. Sloper is sure that he is only after her considerable inheritance, and opposes their marriage. Dr. Sloper takes his daughter to Europe in hopes she will forget Morris, but she does not. After Catherine returns to New York, the young lovers plan to elope. Dr. Sloper threatens to disinherit his daughter. Will this dissuade Morris?

Comments/Reviews

NOTE: If you do not wish to have certain elements of the plot revealed, please wait to read these until after you have seen the film!

I. [From www.filmsite.org]:

A great romantic drama based on Henry James' 1881 novella Washington Square, with an icy musical score from Aaron Copland. In 19th century New York City, a plain, repressed, shy and virginal 'heiress' daughter Catherine Sloper (de Havilland) of a wealthy, arrogant, imperiously abusive, and domineering, widowed, patriarchal physician Dr. Sloper (Richardson) becomes a spinster, after her young, first love toward a handsome, but penniless, mysterious suitor and mercenary, scheming fortune hunter Morris Townsend (Clift) is thwarted by her stern, tyrannically-selfish father, who denies the bride-to-be her inheritance. Pitifully, she is jilted on the night of their elopement. Over many years, her anger is suppressed and simmers, and surfaces when insincere scoundrel Townsend returns and again asks for her hand in marriage. With rational, cold, controlled rage, she turns the tables on him in the final, chilling scene. Academy Award Nominations: 8, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor-- Ralph Richardson, Best B/W Cinematography. Academy Awards: Best Actress--Olivia de Havilland, Best B/W Art Direction/Set Decoration, Best Dramatic Score, Best B/W Costume Design.

II. [By Brian Kollerm (www.imdb.com)]:

The Heiress is an adaptation of the play by Augustus and Ruth Goetz, which in turn was an adaptation of the Henry James novel "Washington Square." The story is about a plain young woman (Olivia De Havilland, best known for her role in Gone With The Wind) who is courted by an attentive suitor (Montgomery Clift). Her prim father (Ralph Richardson) correctly judges Clift to be an ingratiating idler and threatens disinheriting her should she elope. Will De Havilland disobey her father? Will Clift marry her without her fortune? Will father and daughter be reconciled? If you've seen the recent film adaptation of the novel, "Washington Square," you already know the answer to these questions. The Heiress was nominated for a flood of academy awards, but the only major award was Best Actress to De Havilland. Her character begins the story as an earnest wallflower, but becomes proud and mature by its end. De Havilland could play both sides of the character equally well. The film was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Richardson) and Best B & W Cinematography. The competition must have been very strong that year, although I suspect that Oscar votes went to All the King's Men and Twelve O'Clock High because of their appeal to men, while the target audience of The Heiress was women. Why is The Heiress such an outstanding movie? The script is excellent. Clift and especially Richardson are well cast. De Havilland is too lovely to play the plain daughter, but she does it so well. The three major characters are well defined, particularly the father, who belittles his daughter by comparing her with the idealized memory of his late wife.

III. [From The Great Romantic Films by Lawrence J. Quirk (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1974)]:

Olivia de Havilland won her second Academy Award for The Heiress, and it was well deserved, for this hardworking, sincere actress gave one of her most thoughtful performances in this screen version of the Ruth and Augustus Goetz play, with screenplay also by the Goetzes, based on Henry James's Washington Square.

The picture also contains what I consider to be Sir Ralph Richardson's finest all-time performance as Dr. Austin Sloper, the tyrannical patriarch of 16 Washington Square circa 1850, who gives his daughter condescension but not love, and deplores her lack of resemblance to her charming, beautiful and accomplished mother, who died in youth. Montgomery Clift, too, gives one of his better performances as the fortune-hunting Morris Townsend.

Credit for these performances, as well as for a superior picture, is due in no small measure to director William Wyler, whose peculiar gift (among many) was the ability to elicit from actors special qualities and insights that they themselves did not realize they had: he did this for Bette Davis in Jezebel, for Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights, for Miriam Hopkins in These Three, among many others, and his infinite capacity for taking pains, a hallmark of genius, is again apparent in the performances of the three principals of The Heiress.

Wyler, of course, had the benefit of a superior script, polished, literate, perceptive; faithful to the speech and manners of its era; and the photography of Leo Tover, the art work of John Meehan and the distinctive, evocative music of Aaron Copland recaptured the Washington Square ambience of the mid-nineteenth century with a sure artistry founded on endless research and careful conceptualizing - all of which make The Heiress a cinematic gem.

Like all true cinematic art, The Heiress reflects the original artist, in this case the consummate psychologist Henry James. It is a handsomely romantic film - romantic in its settings, its costumes, its music, its overall flavor and atmosphere. It is a delightful blend of the intelligent, the escapist and the realistic, the tender and the dry - elements that can be made to coalesce only if blended by masters. Mastery is apparent in every aspect of this production.

The story has a universal appeal. It tells of Catherine Sloper (de Havilland), a shy, plain girl of the greatest good will who wants only to please the father she loves, yet seems to elicit only his testy disapproval in matters great and small. She is an heiress - she has $10,000 a year from her late mother and will receive another $20,000 on her father's death ($30,000 a year was considered immensely rich in 1850 ) and by all the rules should have been courted by a parade of young aristocrats reaching around the block. However, her gawky stance, her plain demeanor, her lack of charm, put them off.

But along comes Morris Townsend (Mr. Clift), a determined, aggressive young man with more than his share of charm and persuasiveness, who dissipated a small inheritance on a European tour, and is now looking to shore up his fortunes. He pursues Catherine, overwhelms her, deceives the naive young woman into believing he loves her for herself alone, and soon they are engaged.

Her father sees through all this, and curtly rebuffs the young adventurer, but Catherine overrukes him for once in her life, and plans an elopement despite a trip to Europe with her father that does not deflect her purpose, as her father had hoped.

But when Morris learns that plans to break with her father and sacrifice the additional $20,000 a year, which he threatens to leave to his clinic, he precipitously jilts her on the night of their elopement. Embittered, she stands up to her father the next day, informs him that she still loves Morris despite his desertion, tells him that he might have let someone else try to love her, since he himself did not, and adds that when it comes to bitterness and retaliation this is one field in which he will not compare her with her mother. When her father threatens to alter his will, she challenges him to do so, and gets pen and paper, and when he tells her that he doesn't wish to disinherit his only child, now that he is in the throes of a fatal illness, but adds that he has no idea what she will do next, she tells him in icy tones, "That's right, father, you'll never know--will you!"

Her father dies of lung fever shortly thereafter, leaving her his entire estate, and for the next seven years she lives alone in the mansion in Washington Square, and when she has to pass through the back garden where she and Morris had plighted their troth, she finds herself remembering and mourning her loss. Then One day, her aunt Lavinia (Miriam Hopkins) tells her Morris has returned from California and wants to see her. After initial hesitation she agrees; he appears, older, moustached, a little worn and beaten, and asks her to believe that his desertion was actuated by the highest motives, that he did not want to see her sacrifice her fortune. She takes this all in, and agrees to another elopement, but when he returns to pick her up he finds the door barred. She listens ecstatically to his frantic banging as she carries the lamp upstairs; revenge has purged her, and she is at peace.

Miss de Havilland is wise and reticent when the occasion calls for it; breathlessly, shatteringly in love while taken in by her delusion; bitter and indeed diabolical when she turns on the father who had for so long held her in contempt; and slyly catand-mouse4sh with the returned suitor whose lying duplicities she penetrates only too well. For after seven years her character has taken on dignity, a knowledge of the ways of the world and of men's hearts and minds, and her alert expression and wary glances get this transformation across clearly.

Mr. Clift tightropes gracefully with a character that is devious and given to mendacity, yet almost boyish in its greed and consciousness of the power of its own charm. Money and a life of ease, luxury and irresponsibility are his only life-aims, yet there is almost an innocence in his single-minded pursuit of these regardless of whom he hurts--an innocence whose destructive darker side the old maid of Washington Square no longer feels is worth countenancing and indulging.

Miriam Hopkins is fine indeed, as she always is in a Wyler production, for he had a gift of ferreting out the special alchemies of her mystique, and she responded well to him. Her aunt is solicitous, compassionate, romantic yet realistic, and she feels that Catherine should settle for even a greedy man who offers her the physical and romantic image she would have found fulfilling.

Every scene is precise in its detail, carefully wrought, literately written, painstakingly directed. And what scenes! De Havilland's wondering awakening to love as the unctuous Clift whispers sweet nothings and plays a seductive love tune on the piano; her deep, dark agonies as she waits hour after hour in the drawing-room for her inconstant swain to appear for their elopement; her arresting reversal of character and personality as she wages war with her father for the first time ("At last you have found a tongue, Catherine, if only to say such terrible things to me," Richardson gasps).

The ambivalence in her mood and expression as she listens to Clift's lying reassurances and unctuous insincerities the second time around, after which she tells her aunt, "He came twice--I shall see to it he never comes a third time." For pride in her, after all her disillusionment and humiliation, is stronger than passion, and when her shocked aunt tells her, "Oh how cruel you are, Catherine," she replies crisply, "Yes, I can be very cruel, for I have been taught by masters."

Richardson is a joy to behold--starchy, crisply cynical, supercilious toward the daughter he tolerates but despises, brutal with the young man who comes seeking, honestly amazed when he finds his daughter has a strength of spirit to match his own. Under Wyler's guidance, Richardson chisels out a fine cameo of delicately observed moods and nuances, gestures and expressions, all the way from jingling his keys to laying down his gloves. His speech inflections play like the finest music; his mannerisms are precisely attuned to the emotional currents of the moment. A lifted eyebrow, an impatient gesture, the way he closes a door--all illuminate the character of Dr. Sloper.

The Heiress is romance at its disciplined finest--romance essentially desentimentalized, realistic, aware--yet not without its special brand of mourning tenderness and heartbreak. It is a masterpiece by any yardstick, and one of Wyler's enduring memorials.

GC Film Series - Spring 2001

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