It even differs, especially in its transformative finale, from the play it is more closely based on.
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But that is not to say that it’s a particularly faithful adaptation: Wyler’s movie deviates substantially from the author’s plot and text. It’s an act of empowerment too: with each step, Catherine asserts her ownership of herself, her home.įor years, The Heiress was considered a remarkable exception to the rule that James’s novels were unfilmable. It is one of the starkest endings in golden-age Hollywood, a caustic and complex act of revenge that reveals Catherine’s inner steeliness.
I have been taught by masters.” The final images are of Catherine ascending the stairs of her house alone, while Morris fruitlessly batters the front door. It’s a bleak scenario, but one with a richly nuanced climax that sees Catherine claiming her full inheritance, both material and emotional, with the cool line (invented for the film) “Yes, I can be cruel. The rest of the story involves Catherine slowly losing her illusions about the esteem both her father and lover have for her. Sloper intuits that Morris’s motives are mercenary, and resists the match. When a handsome but hard-up young man, Morris Townsend, begins courting Catherine, she falls deeply in love, but Dr. His sister, a widow named Lavinia, also stays with them. Sloper considers his daughter dull and unattractive, especially in comparison with his late wife, her mother. Austin Sloper, in a fine house on New York’s Washington Square. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a naive young woman, Catherine Sloper, lives with her father, Dr. “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” the author wrote in his essay “The Art of Fiction” a few years after publishing Washington Square, adding: “It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way or if it be not an incident, I think it will be hard to say what it is.” Distilled to its bitter essence, the story of the book, the play, and the film is about a woman standing up, in her own house, and looking out at the people closest to her, the world she lives in, in a new and certain way. For James-whose novels are celebrated for their penetrating psychological realism-as for Wyler, incident and character were wrapped up in each other. The director, known for his adaptations of theatrical and literary works, had come to James’s crisp and precise 1880 book via a stage play, also called The Heiress, by Ruth and Augustus Goetz (the couple would also cowrite the screenplay). The one in The Heiress becomes a battlefield. With those tools, he could stoke almost unbearable tension within his confined interiors-no one has ever made better cinematic use of staircases. In his directorial arsenal, he counted such weapons as the careful blocking of scenes, the skillful use of depth of field in his compositions, and indefatigable discipline in his work with actors.
In fact, Wyler put this philosophy into practice throughout his work, which is synonymous with economical classical Hollywood filmmaking, his often inconspicuous style capable of staging moments of deep emotional resonance-and like Henry James, whose novel Washington Square forms the basis of The Heiress, he found high drama in domestic tyrannies. This tenet is fully borne out in the film, with its bouts of genteel but bruising domestic warfare staged within an elegant Manhattan town house. “The emotion and conflict between two people in a drawing room can be as exciting as a gun battle, and possibly more exciting,” wrote William Wyler on the release of his film The Heiress in 1949.
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