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"A sad story. We'll keep it strictly commercial." The titular lass (Jennifer Jones) comes to fin de siècle Chicago full of dreams and readily gets a needle through the finger at the shoe factory, a few hours later there's the added dismay of realizing she's become the kept woman of a glad-handing salesman (Eddie Albert). Elsewhere, the polished restaurateur (Laurence Olivier) lives near the elite yet feels hollow. "What are you looking for?" "Everything." A deep-focus panning shot at the bistro keeps the two in separate frames during their first meeting, rekindled passions and unwise decisions comprise the ensuing affair. "This much happiness I'm going to have," he tells his wife (Miriam Hopkins), then pauses for a pregnant second by the doorway before leaving home and reputation behind. (The heroine's own decisive step takes place aboard the train, a ghostly locomotive roars by the opposite direction to startle the runaway couple.) This is where "the severities of William Wyler," as the very young Godard put it in his very first review, come into play, the Dreiser spiral in all its dolorous grayness. The illicit paradise is a luxurious New York hotel crashed by a bonds company detective, purgatory follows as a teeming Bowery tenement, hell is a squalid flophouse surveyed by a zigzagging overhead track. Jones builds scrupulously on her Emma Bovary while Olivier offers fantastic slices of desire, shame and horror, the diva's rise on the Gaiety Theater alongside the gentleman's degradation like a lost version of A Star Is Born (cf. Ophüls' La Signora di Tutti). Amid fake violins, a wheezing plea: "Find someone to love. It's a great experience." Chaplin's City Lights is visible in the finale. With Basil Ruysdael, Ray Teal, Barry Kelley, Sara Berner, and William Reynolds. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |