2

Coming into His Own

Counsellor-at-Law (1933)

The experience of directing A House Divided whetted Wyler's appetite for more serious projects. That desire was also fueled by John Huston, with whom Wyler formed a lifelong friendship. (Huston once commented that he considered Wyler his best friend in the industry.) Huston, who had lived among the poor in Mexico, convinced Wyler to try a socially conscious film. Hoping to develop a story about the millions of Americans who had been dispossessed and left jobless by the Depression, the two men decided to live among the poor and the homeless to find material for their film. “To know what it was to be a bum, we both took ten cents with us, went downtown in old clothes…. We got a lousy free dinner in a mission after we listened to a spiel and signed statements to the effect that we had come to Christ. Then we spent the night in a flophouse. Ten cents it cost.”¹

That experience produced no script, but Huston and Wyler did collaborate on a screenplay based on a property called “Steel,” which Universal had owned for some time. After reading their script, Carl Laemmle Jr. was interested in producing the film, but the project was eventually shelved. The pair was not idle for long, however. Universal had bought the rights to Oliver La Farge's 1929 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Laughing Boy. Working on that script would occupy Wyler and Huston for much of 1932.

Laughing Boy focuses on the clash between mainstream American culture and that of the Native American peoples of the Southwest. La Farge, who was also an anthropologist, utilized material from his frequent archaeological and sociological expeditions to the region. His novel deals with poverty and the spiritual alienation of Native Americans, as well as prostitution and racism.

Wyler believed that he could turn this story into an epic film foregrounded by a compelling love story, even though Laughing Boy's love interest, Slim Girl, works for a time as a prostitute for white men. By way of research, Wyler and Huston made multiple trips to Arizona, where they camped out with the Navajo. They also traveled to Oklahoma City and Lawrence, Kansas, to watch sacred dances and confer with medicine men on the reservations of the Hopi, Comanche, Crow, and Blackfoot. In his autobiography, Huston wrote of sitting “all day long in a Hogan watching a sand painting being made.”²

Wyler was also in contact with La Farge, who helped by authenticating the details of the script. In a letter written in 1932, Wyler asks him for more color sketches of gods and goddesses and for sketches he can use “for costuming for any or all characters at different stages of the story.” He even asks for pictures of blankets “at different stages of weaving.”³

The project was eventually shelved by Universal, primarily because of problems related to casting the leads. Huston had proposed making the film with real Indians—Mexicans or American Indians—”but even Willy thought that was too wild a notion.”⁴ In a letter to La Farge, Wyler did not specify why the studio had halted production, merely reporting that the film was “indefinitely shelved or postponed.” He went on to write, “I have tried, although unsuccessfully, to interest another studio in the purchase of the book and script, which I understand Universal is willing to sell, and I hope to be able to accomplish this—if not now perhaps later this year, because I don't think Laughing Boy should remain unproduced.”⁵ Universal eventually sold the rights to Metro as a vehicle for Ramon Novarro, but Huston dismissed the film as “wretched and vulgar.”⁶

Wyler and Huston next worked on a script based on Daniel Ahearn's story “The Wild Boys of the Road.” Like the original, their script, titled “Forgotten Boy,” was about children who had run away from home during the Depression because their parents could not support them. Many of them rode the rails, crossing state lines. In some states, officials refused to allow these children to get off the trains, and when a dozen of them died from starvation and thirst in a Texas boxcar, it caused a national scandal. Wyler and Huston traveled around California, talking to brakemen, hobos, and kids. Wyler also had a reader from the studio search for stories in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner about children caught committing crimes, and he attended night sessions of juvenile court.

Huston recalled the script's final scene, involving two boys who had tried to rob a pawnshop: “One of them had been seriously wounded—dying—and the other held a menacing crowd at bay with a gun in his hand. Standing over his dying friend, he shouted to the crowd, ‘You killed him!’ The camera then came around so the kid was pointing the gun into the audience, with the accusation, ‘You killed him!’”⁷ The film was never made because, according to Huston, as it was being prepared for production, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's new administration promptly put these runaways to work in the reforestation program of the Civilian Conservation Corps.

In 1932, Wyler directed a film for Universal, Tom Brown of Culver, about a rebellious boy attending a military academy and his relationships with various friends. Although this material had already been filmed, and the protagonist's character type was based on the nineteenth-century British story “Tom Brown's School Days,” Wyler researched the project with the same thoroughness he had devoted to the two unrealized scripts co-written with Huston. While spending two weeks living in a barracks at a military school, he heard that upperclassmen terrorized the freshmen and wanted to witness this practice firsthand. “So one day I got a couple of older boys to hide me in a closet,” he recalled, and he watched as naked plebes got “slapped around for no reason.”⁸ He included such a scene in the film, but the superintendent of the school, who had final script approval, insisted that it be removed. Nonetheless, Wyler was proud that he had filmed the project on location—a rarity in those days.

Tom Brown of Culver is a pedestrian effort. Wyler gives the film a light touch, emphasizing the camaraderie among Tom and his friends. The more serious subplot—in which Tom discovers that his father, a decorated war hero supposedly killed in action, is really alive—is handled melodramatically. The father ultimately admits that he was really a deserter and runs away again, but Tom finds him and prevents him from committing suicide. Tom then resolves to leave school and stay with his father. As he prepares to do so, however, the father joyously informs his son that he has been exonerated and his Medal of Honor reinstated. The film concludes with Tom proudly pinning the medal on his father and then returning to Culver to complete his studies.

Wyler left Universal briefly in January 1933 because of the studio's failure to make good on its agreement to let his brother Robert direct a film. Wyler was distraught over his desertion of the studio because he felt he owed an enormous debt to Carl Laemmle. Although Laemmle was no longer involved in the day-to-day operation of the studio—which had been taken over by his son—Wyler wrote a heartfelt letter to his old mentor, declaring, “Even though I will no longer be connected with Universal I do not regard my indebtedness to you as being at an end. I will never be able to repay you for your many kindnesses.”⁹

Despite his increased stature in the industry, Wyler was unable to find work. (He even tried to sell the script of Laughing Boy to Paramount when he heard that Universal was willing to unload it.) Frustrated and confused, he returned to Universal a month later, signing a one-picture, $8,000 deal to direct Her First Mate, the third in a series of four comedies starring ZaSu Pitts and her husband, Slim Summerville. Based on a Broadway play called Salt Water, it is a tired film that is not very funny and quite devoid of comic energy. Speaking to his biographer about this sorry project years later, Wyler made the best of it: “There were little pieces of business that were sort of advanced for their time. The wife claims she's pregnant, then her husband discovers she is not but still uses the stratagem.”¹⁰

Wyler, however, was just biding his time. Her First Mate marked the end of his apprentice period, and soon thereafter he signed a new contract with Universal for $1,125 a week. His next assignment was Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Elmer Rice's Counsellor-at-Law. With that film, Wyler would declare himself one of Hollywood's major directors and initiate an extraordinarily rich and productive phase of his career.

Wyler's association with Rice is a fascinating example of the coming together of two artists whose careers have been perceived in similar ways, although today, Wyler is the more famous of the two. Both men were of German origin. Wyler was born in Mulhouse, France, but the town was under German control at the time, and his mother's family was German-Jewish. When he started to attain success in motion pictures, he changed his name from Willy to the more formal William, which he thought would look more imposing on the screen. Rice, ten years older than Wyler, was born in America to German-Jewish parents. Like a true American, he rejected his ancestral past and proclaimed that his identity began with his grandparents’ arrival in America. This New World sensibility also motivated his name change from Elmer Leopold Reisenstein: “I saw no reason for hanging on to a foreign-looking name with which I had no associations or emotional ties.”¹¹

Both men started out in the business world. Wyler was sent to business school in Switzerland to prepare to take over his father's haberdashery, while Rice started as a claims clerk and later put himself through law school. He then rejected both business and the law to become a writer. Likewise, Wyler felt himself unsuited for business and his father's way of life and moved to America to work for his cousin Carl Laemmle in the movies. The most important similarity between the two, however, was their artistic versatility. Rice became an accomplished playwright who successfully utilized a variety of forms. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he seemed equally at home with such divergent styles as expressionism, naturalism, melodrama, and farce. Similarly, Wyler has confounded critics because of his determination to try everything. Not settling for any particular genre, he achieved equal success with intimate character studies, epics, musicals, social films, and melodramas.

Rice was a critic of the Broadway theater, and his concerns seem applicable to Wyler's work in Hollywood as well. Writing in the 1930s, he questioned whether American drama as represented on Broadway could claim to be serious art or whether economic exigencies rendered it merely commercial and thus subliterary. This conflict of art and commerce has been cited numerous times in the decades since, and it has often been used by critics to undercut Hollywood directors. That Rice raised this question is interesting in itself, since his own career is marked by startling inconsistency. Like his literary idols Ibsen and Shaw, Rice wanted to write socially significant drama, and some of his work is still performed and anthologized today, particularly The Adding Machine and Street Scene, but also the lesser-known The Subway and We the People. However, like other American playwrights, Rice also craved Broadway hits, turning out dross such as Cock Robin and The Grand Tour. The artist and critic who hectored the commercial theater was also addicted to it.

Rice's first play, On Trial (1914), was an enormous success. The playwright successfully exploited the rarely used flashback technique to tell the story of the rape of an innocent girl who is on trial for murder. The search for the real murderer moves the trial plot forward, while the story of her rape is told in flashback. The play was such a sensation that during the second intermission on opening night, George M. Cohan offered Rice $30,000 for the rights to the play, but Rice, suspecting a prank, turned him down. Although he eventually made $100,000 from On Trial, Rice dismissed his work as nothing more than “a gimmick.” And as a student of playwrights such as Shakespeare, Galsworthy, and Shaw, he wrote, “I could not understand all of this acclaim.”¹²

Street Scene (1929), which anticipates the structure of Counsellor-at-Law, is a useful guide to Rice's strengths and weaknesses as a playwright. Like the later play, it interweaves a number of plots and introduces a large cast of characters. Most of the incidents are short, building interest and anticipation; Rice shows himself to be adept at altering mood and tempo. He also introduces an array of ethnic types representing melting-pot New York, although by modern standards, most of these characters seem rather broad and stereotypical. It is interesting, since Rice was Jewish, that no character is as unattractive as the Jewish socialist Abraham Kaplan, who is described as “hook nosed with horn rimmed spectacles.” Kaplan's accent is exaggerated, as Rice seems to relish stretching out every syllable and word. Also, although Rice empathized with socialism, his was an idealistic rather than a practical position; he never joined the party and did not care for political squabbles. Nor does he shy away from revealing the anti-Semitism of the other characters. Kaplan is regularly referred to as a “kike” by others, and some of the neighbors are appalled by the relationship between Kaplan's son, Sam, and the Irishwoman Shirley Maurrant. Even Sam's sister tells Shirley that she disapproves of intermarriage. Street Scene is tinged with politics and social commentary, but every time Rice raises an important issue, he quickly diffuses the controversy by resorting to melodrama. The play itself revolves around a melodramatic plot involving Anna Maurrant's love affair, which is discovered by her husband, who then murders his wife and her lover. The issues of poverty, the failure of capitalism, anti-Semitism, and violence are all blurred by the mechanics of the plot and the cartoonish nature of some of the characters, few of whom experience any moments of introspection.

These same weaknesses would also plague Counsellor-at-Law, which opened two years after Street Scene and shared its interest in presenting a variety of ethnic characters. Unlike its predecessor, this play takes place indoors rather than outside a tenement building. Reflecting Rice's experience as a lawyer, Counsellor unfolds in the law offices of Simon and Tedesco, utilizing the firm's waiting room to showcase the variety of social and ethnic types who pass through the office. Rice also throws in references to the Depression, including mention of a businessman jumping off a roof and of a communist agitator who is beaten by the police.

Unlike Street Scene—which, as the title implies, is about the interplay of characters in a New York City neighborhood—Counsellor-at-Law focuses on a bona fide protagonist: George Simon, a high-powered Jewish lawyer. The plot is fueled by his relationships with his high-society WASP wife, his Italian American partner, and the various clients, rich and poor, who come to see him. But as a social drama, the play remains superficial. Rice portrays Simon as a heroic figure who rises above his immigrant origins to become one of New York's most powerful lawyers. He overcharges the rich to get them out of their foolish scrapes but dispenses free legal advice to the poor, especially people from his old neighborhood. He is married to a socially prominent woman whom he blindly worships but who is condescending to him. Her children from her first marriage actively despise him and refuse to consider him their father. Through this relationship, Rice introduces anti-Semitism more obliquely than he did in Street Scene, implying here that Simon's wife and her children reject him because of his Jewishness. This implication becomes more explicit in the depiction of Simon's mother as a caricature of the doting Jewish mother who regularly visits her successful son at his office. The scene between Simon's wife and his mother is one of Rice's best as he highlights their social and ethnic differences and the wife's dismissive and barely tolerant attitude toward her mother-in-law.

Again, however, Rice fails to develop or examine his observations about these ethnic and social divides. Although Simon is depicted as savvy and sharp, he remains oddly obtuse when it comes to his wife. She refuses to support him when he is threatened with disbarment over an impropriety in an old case—discovered by a rival blue-blood lawyer who also resents his Jewishness. She elects instead to go on a cruise with a lover from her own social circle. The play concludes as Simon attempts to jump out the office window but is saved at the last minute by his devoted secretary who not-so-secretly loves him. Once again, a serious issue is undercut by a melodramatic conclusion.

Rice handles the issue of the communist sympathizer in the same way. Harry Becker, the son of a friend from the old neighborhood, has been beaten and then arrested for making speeches on the street. When Simon confronts him, Becker accuses the lawyer of being “a traitor to his class.” He goes on to say, “How did you get where you are?…By betraying your own class…. By climbing on the backs of the working class…. Getting in right with crooked bourgeois politicians and pimping for corporations.”¹³ Simon clearly feels there is some truth in Becker's remarks, but all he can do is threaten to hit him. Rice resolves the scene with an interruption, and the issue is not raised again, as Becker later dies of his injuries.

Counsellor-at-Law ultimately does not succeed as a social play because Rice's progressive instincts yield to those of the commercial showman. The spectacle of Simon's world, the potential scandal, the love story, and the excitement of the multiple stories that crowd the play take precedence over any serious consideration of the issues introduced in the plot. Once again, Rice proves to be a remarkable storyteller with a keen ability to juggle multiple plotlines and a talent for evoking character types with broad strokes. George Simon is a potentially compelling and dynamic character, but he, like the play itself, lacks the depth and complexity to generate significant drama. Dancing around the important questions raised, Rice's melodramatic approach so deeply implicates his protagonist in the corrupt, cynical world around him that the play ultimately glorifies that world, rendering it as an exciting, pulsating locale.

Counsellor was a Broadway success. It did so well, in fact, that a road company production opened in Chicago while the play was still running in New York; it also played in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Universal paid the rather exorbitant sum of $150,000 for the rights to that play and to Rice's The Left Bank. The deal included Rice's services as screenwriter.

The studio wanted Paul Muni, who had played Simon on Broadway, to reprise the role in the film, but he refused; Muni wanted to avoid being typecast as a Jew. Instead, he would make his film debut playing Tony Camonte in Scarface. Samuel Goldwyn, who would soon hire Wyler to direct for his company, famously remarked, “You can't have a Jew playing a Jew; it wouldn't work on screen.”¹⁴ Other actors considered for the part were Edward G. Robinson, Otto Kruger (who starred in the Chicago production), William Powell, and Warner Baxter. The name at the top of the studio's list was John Barrymore—seemingly an odd choice to play a Jewish lawyer from the ghetto—but the younger Laemmle wanted him, despite his hefty fee of $25,000 a week and his reputation for heavy drinking. Even Rice was “delighted to hear that Barrymore is in the cast.”¹⁵ Thirty years later, however, Rice confessed in his autobiography that he “had doubts about his rightness for the part; moreover, he was definitely on the decline.”¹⁶

Viewing the chance to direct an actor of Barrymore's stature as a great opportunity, Wyler did not object either. Barrymore was also pleased to be working with Wyler. When they met, the actor put his arm around the director, declaring, “You and I are going to get along fine, you know. Don't worry about all that temperamental stuff you've heard about the Barrymores. It all comes from my sister and she's full of shit.”¹⁷ Moreover, Barrymore assured Wyler that he was happy to work with him, explaining, “Because you're Jewish you'll be able to help me a great deal with the character.”¹⁸

Hoping to get an early start on the screenplay, Universal sent Wyler to Mexico City to meet with Rice, who was vacationing there with his family. Because the trip would take three days by train, Wyler flew from Juarez on the first Mexican airline; he was the only passenger. And when the plane was forced to land in Leon because of bad weather in Mexico City, he found himself stranded there for three days: “Well, there I was stuck in a crummy hotel full of cockroaches in this town where no one spoke English.”¹⁹ Roaming around the airport, and anxious to get to his destination, Wyler spotted a Mexican worker with bandaged eyes who needed to get to the capital for surgery. He persuaded the pilot that they had to leave immediately or the worker's blindness would be on his conscience. When he finally arrived in Mexico City, however, Rice informed him that he would not discuss business while on vacation, so Wyler spent a few days sightseeing by himself.

Because Rice wanted to fill out the cast with actors from the New York production, Wyler tested a number of them but ended up using only four in the film. For the part of Harry Becker, the communist agitator, he chose Vincent Sherman, who had played the role in the Chicago production and later became a noted film director himself (The Hard Way, Mr. Skeffington). Two other future directors, Bobby Gordon and Richard Quine, also had bit parts. But Wyler opted to cast Hollywood actors for the important supporting roles: Bebe Daniels as Simon's loyal secretary, and Doris Kenyon as his wife. He had some trouble casting Roy Darwin, Mrs. Simon's lover. The studio wanted Sidney Blackmer, but Wyler was “strongly opposed,” explaining in a memo to Laemmle: “casting a man without sex appeal or distinct personality of any kind in the part of Roy Darwin will prove greater harm than you may realize.”²⁰ Wyler got his way, and Melvyn Douglas got the part.

The shooting schedule was set for twenty days. Having signed Barrymore for just two weeks at $25,000 a week, the studio instructed Wyler to shoot all the scenes with Barrymore as quickly as possible and not to stop for close-ups of anyone else—those bits could be done later. “It was mad,” Wyler later noted. “In every scene, I shot only Barrymore, skipping close-ups of anybody talking to him for later. It's a terrible way to make a picture.”²¹ As it turned out, even with this feverish method, the picture took three and a half weeks to complete, largely because of Barrymore's inability to remember his lines.

The actor complained that his part “was longer than the Old Testament,”²² and the lines had to be delivered at lightning speed. A studio log noted at least four substantial delays, some lasting half a day, because of “Mr. Barrymore not knowing his lines.”²³ Vincent Sherman told Jan Herman (Wyler's biographer) that his roommate John Qualen, who had a small part in the film, had been delayed for a dinner appointment because Wyler had to do fifty-six takes of a scene with Barrymore. These memory lapses got so bad that Barrymore's lines sometimes had to be printed on cue cards that were held up by a script girl riding on a dolly. Wyler noted, “Sometimes we had to write on the walls for him or on a piece of the ceiling.”²⁴ Sherman also reported that Barrymore's face looked so puffy that the makeup department had to tape up his jowls with fish skins before he could go in front of the camera.²⁵

Throughout this struggle with the aging actor, Wyler was getting memos from Laemmle telling him to keep up the pace, as well as constant threats that he would be fired if the film was not finished on time. Wyler responded by employing rough tactics on the set, particularly with the supporting players. Freda Rosenblatt, Wyler's assistant, reported, “Willy wore everyone down on the set…. The actors were ready to kill him.”²⁶

Barrymore tried to impress Wyler with his Jewish gestures. While preparing for an early scene in which Simon is at his desk, talking on the phone, Barrymore asked Wyler if he had any suggestions. “No,” said Wyler. “Pick up the phone and talk.” Though Barrymore played the scene well, he added an odd gesture when he picked up the phone, which, he explained to Wyler, was meant to be Jewish. Wyler replied that Simon was a modern, successful man who would pick up the phone like everyone else. Barrymore was unhappy at this correction, and he had to be reined in on other occasions when Wyler thought he was being too ethnic.²⁷

Counsellor-at-Law was the first important American play that Wyler transferred to the screen. (There would be twelve more such adaptations—counting his two versions of The Children's Hour. One could argue, of course, that none of these plays has stood the test of time—only The Little Foxes has had important revivals—but in their day, both the plays and the playwrights were important figures on the American cultural landscape.) This film (and many of the adaptations that followed) shows that Wyler had few peers when it came to faithfully transferring a play to the screen without artificially opening it up and introducing exterior scenes. His preferred approach was to exploit cinematic space primarily through editing and fluid camera work. For instance, all the action in Rice's play takes place over a week's time, either in the law firm's waiting room or in George Simon's office, and Wyler showed his independent streak by resisting the demands of Laemmle and studio manager Henry Henigson that he expand this limited space. Instead, he maintains the interior structure but adds several other locales to Rice's two settings: the building's lobby, where individuals get on and off the elevators, and the offices of John Tedesco, Simon's secretary Regina (Rexy) Gordon, and Herbert Weinberg, a young attorney. Wyler's camera moves rapidly through these various spaces, matching the frenetic pace of the protagonist's typical workday. “I wanted to retain the construction of the play and at the same time have movement,” Wyler explained. “It was only an illusion; we never left the lawyer's offices.”²⁸ This is not completely true, as the action does move out into the lobby on numerous occasions, but as Wyler observed, “No critic ever wrote that it was just a photographed stage play. I avoided that feeling by using several offices…or by having the actors walk or move around at certain moments.”²⁹

The film opens with its only exterior shot, a low-angle view of the Empire State Building. The camera slowly moves up the structure, emphasizing its grandeur as a monument to American ingenuity and enterprise. Counsellor-at-Law was released in 1933, at the nadir of the Great Depression. More than 5,000 banks had closed, and the nation's industry and agriculture were in shambles. No one was predicting a return to prosperity. But Franklin Roosevelt had been inaugurated nine months before the release of Wyler's film, and his ideas for reviving the American economy were beginning to take hold during its preparation and filming. Like the opening shot, the film reflects Wyler's optimism about the direction of the new administration, which was marked by a commitment to balance. In the words of historian Richard H. Pells, “The New Dealers were especially disturbed by the chaos of private capitalism; in their view, American life needed a greater sense of order and control if the nation was to survive the depression.” They also wanted to promote harmony among all social classes without destroying the free-enterprise system. “They believed that government, business, and labor should all subordinate their internal differences to the common welfare.”³⁰ Wyler uses Rice's protagonist to illustrate some of the tensions and difficulties inherent in achieving that kind of political and social transition.

After the exterior shot of the building, Wyler cuts to the elevator, from which a mailman emerges on Simon's floor. The camera pauses on the office door and then follows the mailman into the waiting room, where it pauses again at the switchboard, which is buzzing with activity. Surveying the waiting room, Wyler immediately establishes the ethnic flavor of the firm's clients. Two men who wait for Mr. Tedesco converse in Italian. The arrival of Mrs. Chapman (Mayo Methot) to see Mr. Simon creates a flurry. Her recent acquittal in a notorious murder case is revealed as Wyler cuts away to a newspaper photograph of her behind bars. She is obviously a wealthy celebrity client—the kind that gravitates to Simon, who is clearly the star of the firm and whose entrance is anticipated by everyone.

While Mrs. Chapman is accepting the congratulations of the staff and is being gawked at by the other clients, Wyler keeps Mrs. Becker (Malka Kornstein) in focus at the rear of the frame. The audience will learn later that she is from Simon's old neighborhood and that her son has been arrested as a communist agitator. Her modest presence attests to her outsider status; she quietly observes Mrs. Chapman's celebrity but is clearly not part of that world. This distinction is underscored when Mrs. Chapman, looking around for a seat, refuses to share the couch where Mrs. Becker sits, selecting another seat instead. During the course of this rapidly cut sequence, Wyler introduces Mr. McFadden, a working-class Irishman and a former client who now works for Simon. The audience also gets glimpses of Weinberg's office, Tedesco's office (his back is to the camera), and Rexy's office. Simon's office, which we see before he enters, is grand, spacious, and modern, with a view of the New York skyline. As Rexy enters to put some papers on Simon's desk, Wyler moves his camera away from her to magnify the space. Then he cuts away to watch as Simon finally arrives through his private entrance from the lobby. The important business of the day can now begin.

Wyler's strategy is to introduce various classes and ethnic types either in separate frames or in deep focus because this diverse clientele represents the new and emerging America. George Simon, who embodies American power and capitalist enterprise, but who also arrived in steerage not so long ago, is the one figure who can potentially bring this disparate group together. Perhaps his combination of business acumen and working-class compassion will be the tonic that can restore America's luster.

This more deliberately social and political emphasis may be Wyler's way of compensating for the casting of John Barrymore as a Jewish immigrant. As discussed earlier, Rice softened the anti-Semitic aspects of his play by not developing their implications. The play, however, had a distinctly Jewish actor in the lead; the film does not. This difference becomes problematic in the film during Lena Simon's visits to her son's office. Clara Langsner plays her as an exaggerated version of the doting Jewish mother, and her performance seems even more overplayed today because overuse has made the Jewish mother syndrome a cliché. Her scenes with Barrymore verge on the ludicrous, as do those in which Simon's stepchildren show disdain for his “Jewishness” and then happily go off to lunch with their mother's lover, Roy Darwin (Melvyn Douglas, who looks no more ethnic than Barrymore).

Nevertheless, the film's defects are outweighed by its considerable strengths. Despite Barrymore's inept “Jewishness,” he delivers one of his best performances for the screen. Pauline Kael wrote that it “revealed his measure as an actor.”³¹ Margot Peters summed up Barrymore's experience on the film and his contribution to it: “Jack's fast, abrasive, angry, and very moving performance reflects the harassment he suffered while filming it even as it testifies to the histrionic powers of an almost finished actor.”³²

Barrymore's George Simon is best seen as a character caught between the simple values he learned as a poor kid growing up in humble circumstances and the pressures of realizing and inhabiting his brilliant success. He embodies the typical American success story, with its attendant anxiety and heartbreak. As a lawyer, George veers between representing wealthy clients in high-profile cases for exorbitant fees and dispensing free legal advice to the poor. He is a sympathetic character in both the stage and film versions, despite some underhanded dealings, such as taking advantage of insider stock tips to make a quick profit for himself and his partner. Such opportunism is tempered, however, by his generosity: he gives money to Mrs. Becker to buy groceries, bails her son out of jail, and then pays for his funeral.

The plot revolves around two central stories. George discovers that he is in danger of disbarment because a rival lawyer, Francis Clark Baird, has discovered that years earlier George went along with a client's perjured testimony. George did so only because he hoped his client, Breitstein, could be rehabilitated, but he gets no sympathy from his wife, Cora, who worries how a scandal will affect her social life. She is also annoyed by her husband's associations with lower-class characters and implores him to act more like a “gentleman.” George's attempts to save his career and his marriage form the focal points of the plot. His career is saved thanks to McFadden's underhanded discovery that Baird is having an affair, but his joy is short-lived when he learns that his wife is leaving for Europe with Roy Darwin. Devastated, he is about to jump out his office window when he is stopped by Rexy, who is secretly in love with him. Then the phone rings, bringing news of a new wealthy client in desperate need of his help. Reinvigorated by the prospect of work, he leaves with Rexy to meet his new client.

The audience, no doubt, feels that George's blackmailing of Baird is justified and that he is better off without his society wife and her awful children. A potential union with the compassionate, working-class Rexy (who also gets along with his mother) seems designed to put George in better touch with his true nature and create a more enduring partnership. George, the ending implies, will maintain the lucrative side of his practice, while his relationship with Rexy will solidify his commitment to the working class and the disadvantaged. Roosevelt's vision of a more inclusive America has a chance to succeed.

Wyler shared with other American artists a sense of optimism in the midst of doom: the system was collapsing, but out of the rubble, maybe something better could be built. Wyler had seen his own childhood collapse amid the devastation of World War I, and now, a mere decade after arriving in America, he saw its vaunted system careening out of human control. But the 1930s gave rise to a new cultural radicalism in America, as many came to believe that they could affect their own future. Committing oneself to a cause, regardless of its philosophy, became a form of salvation.

The attitudes and ideologies that were taking root in the 1930s had their basis in the criticisms of American capitalism arising in the previous decade. The breakdown of the country's industrial network was, for artists and intellectuals, a symptom of a more significant problem. The Depression confirmed their belief that competition and acquisitiveness were eroding the country's social foundation. America was losing or had already lost a sense of cohesiveness and community. James Rorty observed in 1932 that the United States “has everything needed for comfortable survival except a definition of human life.”³³ Wyler's George Simon is a man who must put aside his preoccupation with “making it” in order to see what a meaningful human life can be.

Wyler's visual strategy for developing this theme can be traced in a few key scenes. Early in the film, Simon is visited in his office by his wife and his mother. The sequence opens in the lobby, where Roy Darwin is waiting for an elevator and Cora Simon emerges from one. They talk about one of George's high-profile cases—the Crayfield divorce—which Darwin has asked him to drop because it would embarrass the socially prominent Mrs. Crayfield. Then Darwin invites Cora to join him for lunch, and she accepts. The banter is comfortable and casual, and Wyler films them standing face-to-face in two-shots.

Next Wyler cuts to the switchboard, then to Cora in Rexy's office, where she is making calls to arrange the details of an upcoming cruise. Wyler cuts again to the outer office as George's mother Lena enters and sits on the couch without identifying herself. While she waits, Mrs. Simon is greeted by McFadden, a friend from the old neighborhood, who tells her that George has given him a job at the firm. Mrs. Simon beams when she hears about her son's good deeds. Wyler also films this scene in two-shots, but here the characters sit close to each other on the couch; their relationship is tender and affectionate. This framing is repeated when Peter Malone—like McFadden, distinctly ethnic—enters and sits with Mrs. Simon on the couch, holding her hand and talking about her son. Again, the voluble, convivial nature of these unpretentious characters is emphasized. When George appears, he embraces his mother and kisses her affectionately, further emphasizing the close bond he shares with these common people.

As George walks his mother into his office, they are framed by the blinds and the partition of Rexy's office, where Cora is making her phone calls. The class bonds that separate Cora from mother and son are thus rendered visually. In George's office, Mrs. Simon sits on the couch close to George, who is munching on chocolates, and she chides him about spoiling his appetite. Here, as in the waiting-room scene, the framing connotes a connection between these characters, their closeness suggesting affection and love. When Lena brings up the subject of George's dissolute brother who has just passed a bad check, he gets up, paces the office, and yells at his mother, refusing her pleas for help. Despite their disagreement, what Wyler evokes in this exchange is the characters’ ability to express themselves passionately and fervently.

Cora and Mrs. Simon then meet briefly in the office. The mood is formal and cold as the two women stand face-to-face; then Cora lights a cigarette. Here Wyler uses some shot-reverse shots—abrupt cuts that he does not employ in any other scenes featuring George's mother. In parting, Mrs. Simon formally shakes Cora's hand and wishes her a pleasant trip. Cora stays to intervene on behalf of Mrs. Crayfield. The ensuing scene in which Cora asks George for a favor lacks any of the intimacy or passion of his mother's plea on behalf of his brother. George and Cora are presented in a two-shot, but rather than sitting close together, George sits on the edge of his desk and Cora sits in a chair. Their speech is even and formal. When Cora declares that she wished George “practiced law like a gentleman,” he moves away from her toward a window, no longer facing his wife. Cora's reference to her husband's lower-class origins obviously stings—to her, apparently, he is no better than his brother, a petty criminal. Still, he decides to accede to her request and drops the Crayfield case, much to Rexy's disgust. (Wyler cuts to a close-up of her face as George tells her to draw up the papers.) George then asks Cora if he now rates a kiss, and Wyler quickly cuts away from them as the sequence ends.

Wyler emphasizes these points in another paired sequence, this time featuring Cora Simon's children and Harry Becker, the communist agitator. Cora arrives at the office and leaves her children seated in the waiting room, where Harry also sits with his mother. The children are condescending to the workers in the office, and their attitude is not lost on Harry. At one point, when young Richard asks one of the staff to fetch him a magazine, Wyler cuts to Harry's back and then to the children's point of view as he looms over them in a low-angle shot. The children are clearly frightened.

That sequence is interrupted by a shot of Cora waiting in George's office. Wyler places her in a long shot, dwarfed by the office's space. He will replicate that shot with one of George after Cora leaves, and again at the end of the film when he realizes that his marriage is falling apart. George enters and confides to Cora that he is facing disbarment; she is only marginally interested. Again, Wyler films their exchange in a two-shot, and again, they do not touch. Their exchange is formal and cold. Cora's only concern is being involved in a scandal, and George is clearly crushed by her indifference when she insists on leaving for Europe without him.

After she leaves, Harry Becker is ushered in. As their confrontation begins, George is getting his shoes shined, and his back is to Harry. During their exchange, Wyler uses two-shots featuring Harry's blurred, slightly out-of-focus face in the front of the frame, with an in-focus George lecturing him. Harry rejects George's help and says he is not grateful that George bailed him out of jail. His reference to the police as “Cossacks” gets George's goat—he refuses to accept the comparison between America and Russia. When Harry accuses him of being on the wrong side of the class war, George launches into a speech of his own. Wyler moves the camera in on him, isolating him in the frame as he speaks of his origins: “Do you think I don't know what it is to sweat and to freeze and to go hungry?…Don't you come around me with any of your half-baked Communist bull and expect me to fall for it.”

Wyler's framing seems to give George the upper hand until he cuts to Harry, who rises, towering over the seated George, and accuses him of being “a traitor to his class” and “getting in right with crooked politicians and crooked corporations that feed on the blood and sweat of the workers.” George takes all this sitting down, but when Harry calls Cora a “kept parasite,” he rises up to face him. Harry keeps going, however, calling Cora's children “pampered brats.” During this exchange, Harry faces the camera, while George stands with his back to it. When Harry spits on the floor and leaves, George remains facing away from the camera. He has been defeated, and he knows it. Later, when he realizes that Cora has betrayed him, all Harry's accusations will be confirmed.

Counsellor-at-Law is an assured film, expertly made and beautifully acted. It features rapid cutting as Wyler matches his film's style to the fast pace of the play. He employs some expressive camera movements and framings to accentuate the social and political aspects of the play he has chosen to forefront. Although Counsellor does not display the hallmark of Wyler's mature style, which emphasizes staging scenes in depth during extended dialogue scenes and thus eliminating the need to cut back and forth, it is a model of his ability to use editing, with some in-depth stagings, to bring a stage piece vividly to life on the screen.

After filming, Wyler had difficulty with the censors. Near the end of the play, after Rexy's intervention to prevent George's suicide, there is a call from Theodore Wingdale, president of the American Steel Company. Rexy asks George if he wants to speak with Wingdale, and he replies, “Tell him to go to hell.” This line was deemed unacceptable. Wyler argued that the line was necessary because it was funny—“not because of the humor of the particular line, but because with the deletion of the climax the picture remains unrelieved and we eliminate the only bit of comedy relief in the ending of the picture.”³⁴ Wyler lost that battle: the line was changed to “Tell him to go to the devil.”

The film opened on December 7 at Radio City Music Hall. The critics loved it, and it turned into a commercial success as well. Rice, who did not like Hollywood, was delighted with the film. In a telegram to Wyler he wrote, “The picture is excellent in all its details and you have every reason to be proud of the fine job you have done. I am sure that your work will receive general recognition.”³⁵

Wyler, however, was not entirely happy with the “recognition.” Although the Los Angeles press praised his direction, the New York press generally avoided naming the director in its reviews. This rankled, given that Wyler's name was included in many of the film's advertisements. Wyler knew he was coming into his own as a director of importance, and he wanted industry members to be aware of his work as well.