Today The Heiress seems such a simple story— a Harlequin romance, without the feel-good ending—but at the time, it got my attention, and I remembered it for decades. The movie was filmed in 1949, but didn’t reach the northern Canadian community where I lived until I was thirteen, in 1952. Starring the talented Olivia de Havilland as the main character, Catherine Sloper, and heart-throb Montgomery Clift as Morris Townsend, the movie evolved from a Henry James novel, Washington Square. The film—wait for it— is about a sheltered young woman, who falls in love with a handsome young man who is considered a fortune hunter by her wealthy and verbally abusive father.
The Story
Catherine’s father is disappointed in his daughter. She is timid and fearful, and not beautiful. When she meets Morris, she is immediately enamored with him, but too shy to speak up. He is kind to her, and is able to bring her out of her shell. Not surprisingly, she falls in love with him. When he suggests marriage, she is ecstatic, and tells her father. But her father objects, saying that Morris is a callow fortune hunter who only wants her money, and threatens to disinherit her if she marries him.
She tells Morris about her father’s threat, and they plan to elope. On the night they are to leave, Catherine waits all evening, but Morris doesn’t come.
That night, she and her father have an argument, and Catherine learns her father is ill. Eventually her father dies and Catherine inherits the estate, and begins her unhappy single life in the family mansion. Years later Morris comes back, with a lie about why he rejected her, and attempts to re-open his relationship with her. Catherine promises to marry him, but when he comes for her later that evening, she locks the door, leaving him outside, calling her name. As Tim Dirks observes,
“She realized that neither of the two dominant males in her life had ever loved her, but had only cruelly dominated over her: “Yes, I can be very cruel. I have been taught by masters.”
The Lesson
Frequently, in movies of the 1940s, there were morals, or lessons to be learned and applied to your own life. In this movie, the lesson was simple and bleak. It appears that the moral of this story is that Olivia should have accepted her lot as a plain woman, and not pined for someone who was as beautiful as she was plain. Morris, on the other hand, was not in her class, and could only have been interested in her wealth. It was a lesson which discouraged the intermingling of class and status, a theme which was endemic in western cultures of that era. Brilliantly performed, the movie also explored the psychological effects of verbal abuse, abandonment and revenge.
The Context
This movie is a throwback to the mid 1800s, when customs were stifling and rigid. Why it had such an impact, gaining several academy awards, and being so popular at the box office had little to do with its place in history, and more to do with excellent acting and presentation. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won four Oscars. Olivia de Havilland won a second Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Catherine, and also won the Golden Globes Award for Best Motion Picture Actress.
At the end of the 1940s, Americans still felt the effects of the depression and the war, and were adjusting to the return to peacetime. The release of the atomic bomb and the arrival of the Cold War brooded over everything, causing a culture of cynicism and the fading of idealism. As McCarthyism cast a pall over Hollywood, and studios were swamped with lawsuits, the motion picture industry faced a challenging period, which ended in the destruction of the existing studio system.
Tim Dirks summed up the challenges facing the movie industry:
“Hollywood suddenly found itself with many threatening forces at the close of the 40s and the start of the next decade:
- the coming of television forcing potential moviegoers to remain at home
- blacklisting and McCarthyism
- a 1945 studio labor union strike that raised salaries 25% for studio employees
- a short-lived 75% import duty, from 1947-1948, that restricted the import of all US films into the UK
- the gradual decline of theatre-attending audiences
- inflation that raised film production costs
- anti-trust rulings by the US government against the studios”
As the anti-trust rulings settled over Hollywood, studios had to give up their vast theater holdings, and adjust to less lucrative methods of marketing. Stars were no longer “owned”, movie companies could no longer “block book” and fix admission prices, and the industry was forced to become more competitive.
Filmed against this backdrop, it is not surprising that The Heiress, was so successful at the box office and so well received by the public. It lifted the movie industry out of its obligation to reflect the culture of the times, and provided the public with escapist entertainment, pure and simple.