|
The chemin étrange, as Bresson would say, from Kansas City hotel to upstate New York cell. "A fine face" begs a coin, the bellhop (Phillip Holmes) has places to go, a car accident pushes him out of the evangelical nest. Foreman at the factory, affair with the poor worker (Sylvia Sidney). (His visage as he pressures her for sex is warped by shadow patterns from bare branches, his smile once she gives in is fixed in a freezing close-up.) "Good enough to betray but not good enough to marry," an obstacle to the world of luxury embodied by the pretty debutante (Frances Dee), the solution comes in a layered composition—newspaper hawker barking in the background, aftermath of a drowning superimposed, eyes hooded by the brim of a fedora as an idea creeps into the mind. "I don't know how I could have done this thing!" Josef von Sternberg's Dreiser is not Eisenstein's, naturally, his determinism is not the agitprop of societal injustice but the eternal drift of desire and death. ("It is not new, and it will never be old.") Intertitles on a rippling screen, the fateful canoe in the lake like a dot on a canvas, the swanky boating party disturbed by distant shots. The tracking camera is one more machine in the stamping department, a lateral scan at the missionary shelter locates the protagonist's ponderous mother (Lucille La Verne) under signs reading "Have faith" and "The wages of sin is death." The murder trial is a different form of theater, "moral cowardice" is the malady analyzed in the courtroom while a vast tree trunk towers outside the window. "We never gave you the right start..." A Place in the Sun is the official gloss, Strangers on a Train the oblique one. With Irving Pichel, Frederick Burton, Claire McDowell, Emmett Corrigan, and Charles Middleton. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |