|
Griffith's The Avenging Conscience is a close forerunner, and nearly a decade later Kafka has Amerika. The company clerk (Raymond Hatton) has little to show for his hard work besides a frayed overcoat, the "hall of echoes" within materializes like angels and devils on his shoulders to murmur guidance and temptation. His wife (Kathlyn Williams) yearns for a new dress, he steals from his boss and flies the coop, the sodden corpse found in the woods is made to bear his name. Guilt, paranoia and desperation, all descendants of "the slow acid of discontent." On the cusp of the Jazz Age, Cecil B. DeMille exorcises his 19th-century morality with an arresting nightmare. His lighting and editing linkages are of particular note: The fugitive suffers an accident at the grayish harbor, and his mother (Edythe Chapman) feels something as the bedroom around her darkens into an anguished spotlight. Later, his seedy dalliance with the Chinatown kitty (Julia Faye) is intercut with his widow's sumptuous wedding to the investigator turned governor (Elliott Dexter). Bible verses, death and resurrection and death again, disembodied superimpositions. The scrounger in the courtroom is a stranger to his beloved, he can only cackle at the verdict. "I didn't think it could be done—but they've done it! They've convicted a man of the murder—of himself!" The morbid sacrifice rattles in the unjust system, sometimes it takes a deeply materialistic artist to come up with a withering critique. The crumpled flower by the electric chair and the shabby phantom in the lavish household, "God's dreadful dawn was red." Renoir offers a comic anagram in La Chienne. With Noah Beery, Guy Oliver, and Tully Marshall. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |