The Heiress
“I have been taught by masters”: it’s a great line, and one wonders to what degree it was precisely this moment that struck audiences at the time as an irresistibly delectable moment when a narrative and a character crystallise into a form that they had felt coming, but only uncertainly. Perhaps in savouring that moment those audiences were to an extent being deceived into projecting greater significance than is actually there, yet the effect is not nothing and is undoubtedly dependent on the craft of the filmmakers. Irving Singer considers the film to be a masterpiece, and sees in this version of the Henry James story both a reflection of changing attitudes to sexual difference and an expression of timeless truths about the fundamental character of that difference, as reflected in the following two quotations (Singer, 2008, p. 125 and pp. 127–28):
“The Wyler movie was released in 1949, just after the World War II period in which females entered the economy as never before. The men were in the armed forces, and many women at home realized that they were capable of doing jobs in the factories, even as welders, from which they had always been excluded. Though THE HEIRESS purports to be about life a hundred years earlier, it responds and also contributes to the phase of the women’s liberation movement that existed at the time. Catherine’s hostility toward the tyrannical patriarch who has ruined her life is so powerful that she glumly waits outside in the park and rejects his plea for her to be with him when he dies. Instead of maintaining the storyline in which Catherine’s submissiveness and filial dedication remain despite the harm her father has done to her, Wyler’s shifting from the duel between Morris and Sloper to the emerging and combative strength of Catherine in opposition to her father creates an overarching rhythm that has a dramatic tension of its own. The greatness of the film largely results from that.“
“After Catherine had asked Morris to wait while she brings down her wedding gift for him, he looks about the sumptuous house and happily tells Lavinia: ’I’m home! I’m really home!’ He means the residence he previously wanted, possibly more than he wanted Catherine. But now his basic impulse is explicated through the concept of ’home’. Every male yearns to return there in some fashion, and the woman he marries brings with her a mythic womb that itself symbolizes the home from which her suitor came and may reenter under the altered conditions of normal heterosexuality. Morris’s terminal exclusion reverberates with the tragedy Adam undergoes when he is thrust out of Eden. At stake is more than just rectifying the moral flaw referred to in Hamlet. It is also the danger of death-in-life that we all must face throughout our existence. Being star-crossed lovers, Catherine and Morris are each doomed to that painful outcome.“
“The Wyler movie was released in 1949, just after the World War II period in which females entered the economy as never before. The men were in the armed forces, and many women at home realized that they were capable of doing jobs in the factories, even as welders, from which they had always been excluded. Though THE HEIRESS purports to be about life a hundred years earlier, it responds and also contributes to the phase of the women’s liberation movement that existed at the time. Catherine’s hostility toward the tyrannical patriarch who has ruined her life is so powerful that she glumly waits outside in the park and rejects his plea for her to be with him when he dies. Instead of maintaining the storyline in which Catherine’s submissiveness and filial dedication remain despite the harm her father has done to her, Wyler’s shifting from the duel between Morris and Sloper to the emerging and combative strength of Catherine in opposition to her father creates an overarching rhythm that has a dramatic tension of its own. The greatness of the film largely results from that.“
“After Catherine had asked Morris to wait while she brings down her wedding gift for him, he looks about the sumptuous house and happily tells Lavinia: ’I’m home! I’m really home!’ He means the residence he previously wanted, possibly more than he wanted Catherine. But now his basic impulse is explicated through the concept of ’home’. Every male yearns to return there in some fashion, and the woman he marries brings with her a mythic womb that itself symbolizes the home from which her suitor came and may reenter under the altered conditions of normal heterosexuality. Morris’s terminal exclusion reverberates with the tragedy Adam undergoes when he is thrust out of Eden. At stake is more than just rectifying the moral flaw referred to in Hamlet. It is also the danger of death-in-life that we all must face throughout our existence. Being star-crossed lovers, Catherine and Morris are each doomed to that painful outcome.“
Mini Review: “I have been taught by masters”: it’s a great line, and one wonders to what degree it was precisely this moment that struck audiences at the time as an irresistibly delectable moment when a narrative and a character crystallise into a form that they had felt coming, but only uncertainly. Perhaps in savouring that moment those audiences were to an extent being deceived into projecting greater significance than is actually there, yet the effect is not nothing and is undoubtedly well-crafted.
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