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Russia before the Revolution is a confessional manuscript, "the old days, we're all in it." The provincial magistrate (George Sanders) is the writer, cutting and melancholic, engaged to the publishing heiress (Anna Lee) but not immune to the wiles of an alluring peasant (Linda Darnell). "I'm afraid Heaven is not my destination." The girl enters barefoot, she models the gift of boots from the vantage point of her soused father (Sig Ruman) milking a goat, the image dissolves to a screenful of towers and onion domes. She flinches at kissing the cross during her wedding to the superintendent (Hugo Haas), her ascent continues on to the decadent nobleman (Edward Everett Horton). "Life is such a bore that one has to do something in self-defense." Chekhov by way of Douglas Sirk, a most erudite translation. The femme fatale is aware of beauty but scared of lightning, "heavenly electricity" she calls it, a motif among different characters. Obsession is the hobgoblin: "I've known love. This is different." The husband suffers accordingly, the judge is a weak man haunted by justice aveugle, a shattered mirror follows his song. The disintegrating empire as a laboratory experiment, with Eugen Schüfftan in the studio. It has its Règle du jeu side, the attack during the shooting party hinges on the testimony of the little maid (Laurie Lane). (La Chienne informs the later passages.) The ruined count filching cigarettes, the discarded memento of a dance card, the fading gaze of a stabbed vixen. "A phantasmagoria of violently conflicting emotions," illuminated by Sirk's cruel wit. It ends up in Trotsky's dustbin of history, naturally. Preminger has Darnell and Sanders in Forever Amber, Buñuel has reasonable facsimiles in Susana. With John Philliber, John Abbott, and Robert Greig. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |