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A remembrance of A Drunkard's Reformation from the vantage point of the Depression, D.W. Griffith's final film. "Man's struggle against intemperance" is the theme for a tale of tainted hooch and domestic skirmishes, at once antique and modern: The waltzing couples in the 1911 prologue are John Singer Sargent canvases in motion, the table-hopping chatter at the beer garden is taken up by Losey and Pinter in The Servant. From the American Belle Époque to the teeming saloon of the Jazz Age, marriage for the couple (Hal Skelly and Zita Johann) is a promise to go dry. At the factory an Ozu composition (smokestacks and passing train), a bit of liquid courage heralds the beginning of the end. "Sarsaparilla?! What do you think this is, a pansy bed?" The addict's fall, the wife's perseverance, the daughter (Edna Hagan) whose story will be told (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn). Translucent technique meets the creakiness of the narrative head-on and transforms it—the sot returns to a bare home, the neighboring window has his little girl and uplifting music, contorted with shame he trudges away from the screen-within-a-screen. Racketeers and hoochie-coochie cheats, a country on the skids, "not presented as a preachment either for or against Prohibition." In the darkened shack a reconfiguration of Broken Blossoms, paterfamilias' violent haze and frightened child and mother to the rescue, as naked and uncomfortably vivid as Cassavetes. Griffith at this junction has every right to quote Frost ("What to make of a diminished thing"), instead he bids the medium a smiling farewell ("Dear, your eyes are all shiny"). With Charlotte Wynters, Evelyn Baldwin, Jackson Halliday, and Claude Cooper. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |