A Film Canon

Despite exuding a sickly, semi-incestual proximity that constellates around staircases, The Heiress falls short of the enlivened spaces of Wyler's earlier films, gravitating more towards period drama than chamber drama, and undermining its deep-focus aspirations with a palpable flatness encapsulated in protagonist Catherine Sloper's (Olivia de Havilland) obsessive embroidery, only partly remedied through a poetic use of mirrored surfaces. This is reinforced by the self-conscious literariness of Henry James' Washington Square, from which the narrative premise - a young, nineteenth-century New York heiress (de Havilland) torn between father (Ralph Richardson) and suitor (Montgomery Clift) - is drawn, and which ensures that de Havilland's part is particularly redolent of written, rather than spoken language - specifically a grating refusal to contract - that imbues her peformance with a clumsy, stultified staginess. That said, this is not necessarily at odds with her character - "an entirely mediocre and defenceless creature with not a shred of poise" - nor with the narrative trajectory, which involves her gradual, nuanced recognition that both suitor and father have completely objectified her, reduced her to a mere synecdoche for her inheritance - the former through a sudden, traumatic break with his romantic professions, the latter through a more gradual manifestation of disdain - producing the surprising conclusion that an exploitative marriage is preferable to a disinterested parent.