Adept at adaptations

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William Wyler directed Academy Award-winning movies -- "Mrs. Miniver" and "The Best Years of Our Lives" -- right before and immediately after his World War II service as a documentary filmmaker commissioned with the Army Air Corps. "Best Years" ended a long association with producer Samuel Goldwyn but had no immediate successor, in part because of an ill-conceived postwar business partnership with Frank Capra and George Stevens.

Their start-up independent company, Liberty Films, quickly became a drain on the limited resources of the talent. A bailout deal from Paramount was accepted, perhaps most gratefully by Mr. Wyler, who also became the only partner who fulfilled the original terms of the agreement by completing five features for the studio -- "The Heiress," "Carrie," "Detective Story," "Roman Holiday" and "The Desperate Hours."

Mr. Capra didn't get beyond two vehicles with Bing Crosby, "Riding High" and "Here Comes the Groom." Mr. Stevens scarcely shortchanged Paramount, since "A Place in the Sun" and "Shane" were two of his three pictures. But Mr. Wyler equaled their combined output not only at Paramount but for the remainder of their careers, completing 13 films while Mr. Capra settled for five and Mr. Stevens had time for eight.

Olivia de Havilland prompted the first of the Wyler projects at Paramount by urging him to see "The Heiress," a Broadway adaptation of the Henry James novella, "Washington Square." She was keen on playing the heroine, Catherine Sloper, the shy and cruelly manipulated daughter of a prominent, widowed New York physician of the mid-19th century.

Undervalued by her snobbish father, Catherine is then deceived by an engaging young fortune hunter, Morris Townsend, whose greed prevents him from going through with an elopement that might cost him access to part of the girl's inheritance. A tidy sum is safely within his grasp, but Townsend sabotages himself and betrays Catherine's trust by holding out for more.

William Wyler had directed several prestige adaptations of plays between 1933 and 1941: "Counsellor-at-Law," "The Good Fairy," "These Three," "Dodsworth," "Dead End," "Jezebel," "The Letter," "The Little Foxes." Indeed, he had made theatrical immediacy and refinement stylistic specialties, manipulating composition and performance in ways that seemed to place you in the middle of enhanced theater experiences. Improving on a front-row-center perspective, he provided moviegoers with invisible onstage proximity.

"The Heiress" was the work of a conjugal playwriting team, Ruth and Augustus Goetz. The association paid off only modestly at the box office but handsomely in prestige: The film won four Academy Awards, including best actress for the enterprising Miss de Havilland and musical score for Aaron Copland. Mr. Wyler was a directing nominee again, but the Goetzes were overlooked by Hollywood writers.

A truly historic bet was missed when Ralph Richardson, a veteran of the London cast, failed to win as supporting actor for his peerlessly snobbish Dr. Sloper. (The winner, Dean Jagger in "12 O'Clock High," was playing the nicer guy, hands down.)

The movie's second best casting stroke was Montgomery Clift as the attractive but faithless Townsend. Fresh from his triumphant debut year in "The Search" and "Red River," Mr. Clift played his first rotter and moral weakling in "The Heiress." Perhaps that was too disillusioning for popular audiences at the time, but it remains a superbly perverse performance: Despite repeated viewings, you want Townsend to be less of a cad than he is.

Mr. Wyler returned to an American literary classic for his next movie, "Carrie," an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's first great social novel, "Sister Carrie." Reluctantly published in 1900, it was destined to become a landmark of literary naturalism and -- for a generation or more -- a pariah. The Goetzes did the screenplay and provided an intelligent condensation of a sprawling source, but the results never had prestige value for Paramount -- or the public they halfheartedly solicited.