In 2005,
the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress added the 1934
version of Imitation of Life to the National Film Registry, its roster of
“culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” films. Archivist Ariel
Schudson’s essay marking the occasion touts the film as “a defining moment in
the history of women in film and a watershed moment for African American
casting in Hollywood.” Directed by John M. Stahl for Universal Pictures, and
based on Fannie Hurst’s best-selling 1933 prefeminist rags-to-riches novel of
the same name, the film raises issues of gender roles, labor, race, identity, and
the American dream in a melodramatic framework that might have otherwise been
regarded as that of a mere “ladies’ picture.” Indeed, much of the film’s action
focuses on the domestic sphere and the intimate, homey matters regularly
dismissed as women’s work. But Stahl, like Hurst, uses domestic spaces to give
audiences a closer perspective on such intimacies, employing the themes of
interracial friendship and racial passing as metaphor and provocation.
The film
begins humbly enough, with a close-up of a rubber duck floating in a bathtub;
we hear the sound of splashing in the background, and over it an insouciant
child’s voice whining, “Want my quack-quack!” The scene cuts to a white woman
with short dark hair, as she pulls a small white girl from the tub and wraps
her in a large towel. The two banter about the day to come, when “Mother has to
work” and the unwilling baby girl must go “to the day nursery.” This domestic
sketch of Bea Pullman (Claudette Colbert) and her toddler daughter, Jessie
(Juanita Quigley), lasts only a few minutes before we are introduced to a Black
woman, Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers), who comes to Bea’s home in response to
an advertisement seeking a “cook, laundress, housemaid, colored, not afraid of
hard work, moderate wages.” As it happens, Bea has not placed the notice, and
Delilah and her light-skinned daughter, Peola (Sebie Hendricks), have come to
the wrong address. Still, Bea’s haphazard household—the result of her divided
attention between so-called women’s work and breadwinning (through phone sales
of maple syrup)—provides Delilah with an opportunity to press her case for
employment. She improvises on the spot, making a neat breakfast for Jessie and
the preoccupied Bea, then pleads, “If I could just get a home for my little girl,
I’d be glad to work for just room and board.” Bea, initially reluctant, is
ultimately won over.
Impressively,
before ten full minutes of screen time have elapsed, the interracial
work/living/family arrangement that forms the basis of the story has been
struck between these two very different women. By 1934, Stahl was no stranger
to women’s pictures; he had already directed more than two dozen films filled
with romance, elopements, seductions, divorces, and female protagonists who
loved and lost. But Imitation of Life’s plot included amplified social
complexity: a female-headed, interracial “family,” and the taboo topic of a
Black daughter who “looks” white and wishes to “pass” into the white world
unburdened by Blackness.
Throughout
the film, the events on-screen create an uneasy, even awkward, oscillation
between the two mother-daughter pairs that constitute the center of its story.
This unease was perhaps to be expected in 1934, when mainstream Hollywood
offerings rarely included Black characters with plotlines consisting of their
own affairs, much less featured topics that even indirectly referenced white
racism or anti-Blackness. Major studios regularly deferred to the bogey of the
“southern box office,” a myth that furnished white studio executives with a
pretext for stereotyped, marginal depictions of Black characters. Imitation of
Life’s assumptions about race and gender are often just as one-dimensional or
uncritical as those of other mainstream films of its time. For example, Bea’s
need to work is itself presented as a problem, one that ultimately destabilizes
her family and her relationship with her daughter. By contrast, Delilah’s hunt
for a job, particularly as a domestic, is so completely standard for a Black woman
that she can find it codified in the newspaper’s classifieds section. Still,
Imitation of Life offered an unprecedented story for Hollywood. And audiences
lined up for it, with screenings extended and “held over” in nearly every major
city in the United States. The movie’s popularity with Black audiences was such
that Universal took the similarly unprecedented step of creating an
accompanying publicity trailer specifically for segregated Black theaters,
something no major studio had done for a mainstream film before.
Hurst’s
novel, too, had been a sensation. When she published it a year earlier, she was
already one of America’s most famous writers, known for her compelling,
readable “woiking goil” tales. Hurst biographer Abe C. Ravitz claims Hurst’s
“gaslight sonatas,” often set in the Jewish ghettos of large American cities,
as forerunners of contemporary American feminism, featuring archetypal,
white-adjacent, working-class New Women. Hurst’s short stories appeared in
popular magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Collier’s, and the Saturday Evening
Post as early as 1909. Raised in St. Louis, Hurst had been living and writing
in New York City for a decade by the 1920s and had there formed friendships
with leading stage producer Daniel Frohman and silent-film scenarist Frances
Marion. Both were admirers of Hurst’s scrappy underdog heroines, her quickly
paced writing, and the marketable balance between urban realism and weepy
melodrama in her plots. With her connections to the entertainment industry, and
the adaptive interplay between silent film and print media, Hurst’s published
stories and novels soon became regular choices for cinematic treatment.
Imitation
of Life was Hurst’s eighth novel, and because of the two film adaptations made
of it—Stahl’s and the glossier 1959 version directed by Douglas Sirk—it is
likely her best-known work today. It is often characterized as owing something
of its plot to Hurst’s friendship with Harlem Renaissance novelist, folklorist,
and cultural anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. Hurst and Hurston first met in
1925, at a National Urban League–sponsored literary contest in Harlem. Hurst
was known as a slightly scandalous bohemian by this time, and an outspoken
“friend of the Negro.” She served as a judge for the Urban League’s contest, in
which Hurston’s story “Spunk” took second prize. Hurston’s writing and
ebullient personality also helped her secure a scholarship to Barnard College
through the largesse of its founder, Annie Nathan Meyer, who was in attendance
that evening. As Hurston began her studies at Barnard, and needed a job with
flexible hours, Hurst stepped in, initially employing her briefly as a live-in
personal secretary, and then keeping her on for about a year as a companion and
chauffeur.
It is
tempting, if ill-advised, to look immediately for parallels on the theme of
interracial cohabitation between this arrangement and Imitation of Life. Beyond
the obvious conceit of a white woman opening her household to support a Black
woman in need, it is difficult to imagine how Hurst could have conjured either
simple Delilah or tragic Peola from the flamboyant, eccentric, and utterly
complex Hurston. Hurst and Hurston’s letters and their writing about themselves
and each other furnish evidence to suggest that, despite their well-publicized
friendship, the differences in race, class, and generation were not easily
surmounted between them. Indeed, if there is a salient way to understand
anything like a connection between their friendship and Hurst’s authorship of
Imitation of Life, it may be through this inequity and opacity in the
relationship. Such gaps are present in the unequal friendship between Bea and
Delilah. And while Delilah and Peola’s racially charged plot is unusual
compared with depictions in other Hollywood films of the time, as characters,
their capacity to understand and navigate their circumstances is arguably
limited by Hurst’s own capacity to understand racial dynamics, or to know her
“friend” Zora.
Stahl’s
body of work makes clear that as a director he was both socially progressive
and consistently interested in women’s stories. Already in Her Code of Honor
(1919), one of his earliest silents, one can see many of the narrative tropes
that would become familiar in his oeuvre, including secrets, mother-daughter relationships,
and questions of parentage and identity. Stahl began the second half of his
career at Universal, making his first talkies, including Seed (1931) and
another Hurst adaptation, Back Street (1932), both of which, like Imitation,
concerned the plight of independent white women. His visual style tends toward
sincerity and simplicity. Yet as Black feminist scholar Valerie Smith suggests,
in the case of Imitation of Life, this aesthetic “‘sincerity’ . . . implicates
viewers more directly in the effects of specific constructions of race and
gender relations,” underscoring the film’s race problems and limiting
audiences’ opportunities to keep these tensions at a distance.
Stahl’s
efficiently edited introduction to Bea and Delilah’s “Boston marriage” as the
heart of the narrative marks a departure from Hurst’s book, which devotes
fourteen chapters to Bea’s life from teenager to widow to desperate mother,
before Delilah and Peola even make the scene. With the two-family household so
quickly assembled, Peola’s light skin, her attempts to pass as white, and the
disruption and anguish these actions cause come to constitute the film’s most
central, compelling conflict. This streamlining of the story means that, in
Stahl’s film, the white characters regularly rely on the Black characters and
their B plot for narrative interest. Nevertheless, the Black characters still
receive less screen time—especially the grown Peola, played by Fredi
Washington. It is a paradox that highlights Imitation’s profound ambivalence about
race and marks it as bearing a kind of insoluble representational conundrum for
mainstream cinema.
This
insuperable quality connects Imitation’s representational, cultural, aesthetic,
and industrial problems. The earliest of them, the Production Code
Administration’s preproduction objections to the film, was based on a
regulation broadly prohibiting depictions of “miscegenation,” a term the Hays
Office defined as “sex relationship between the white and black races.” The PCA
ultimately provided full approval, but the film bears traces of the office’s
initial discomfort with its racial themes. In the end, keeping in mind Hurst’s
undersketched Black characters and Stahl’s sincerity, Imitation of Life offers
an earnest and ambivalent approach to its political subject matter, an
admixture that may well have been the secret to the film’s widespread appeal.
Consider
the scene in which Delilah, offered a scanty 20 percent share in the pancake
company that Bea has established in her image and name, and from her family
recipe, refuses the money on the sentimental grounds that she wants to continue
being Bea’s cook. Stahl establishes a nearly static visual for much of the
scene, which wavers between mockery of and admiration for Delilah’s principled
loyalty. And this moment’s low-level tension is as much about its comparison of
selfless Delilah with ambitious Bea as it is about the fact that Delilah—who
calls herself Bea’s “cook,” not her “friend”—has underwritten all of Bea’s
independent financial success.
Ambivalence
and anxiety over the cultural problem of Peola, as a light-skinned character
who disavows her racial status, make their way into the movie’s visuals as
well. Film and media scholar Susan Courtney suggests that Delilah’s large,
dark-skinned body is used throughout Imitation to counterbalance Peola’s
racially destabilizing effects. Essentially, Delilah embodies an “Old Negro”
figure, excusing American racism through loyal contentment with her subjugated
lot. By contrast, Peola is the filmic incarnation of the New Negro, a
self-determined, autonomous, and intellectual Black American citizen whose
humanity indicts slavery and white supremacy as criminal, abusive systems. Her
light skin carries the relative privilege that southern lawmakers built into
American slavery, which evolved thereafter into a semiformal, intraracial caste
system for many Black communities. But her color also grants her greater
proximity to the material, cultural, and social benefits of whiteness, making
her story a threat to the segregated U.S. of 1934. The casting of light-skinned
African American actor Washington, rather than a white actor, further
strengthened Peola’s political and social impact, as did Washington’s restrained,
urbane performance.
Paradoxically,
these “problems” that Imitation of Life sought to negotiate on-screen created
novel opportunities for Black viewership and identification, inadvertently
opening up unprecedented space for Black representation on its own terms. For
example, the scene of Delilah’s funeral at the film’s end, attended by her
previously unseen Black community, features over five hundred extras, who made
the most of the opportunity. These folk were members of Harlem’s own “Negro
lodges, including the Knights Templars, Elks, Calanthians, Daughters of Elks,
and Households of Ruth, all dressed in their customary uniforms and presiding
with dignity,” in an artful display of homegrown Black pride. This quotation
from the well-respected Chicago Defender speaks more broadly to Imitation’s
resonance in the northern, midwestern, and western cities that growing numbers
of African Americans now called home. The coverage of Imitation of Life in the
Defender and other city-based Black newspapers across the country celebrated
and debated Beavers and Washington as the film’s legitimate stars. For despite
the profound limits of Delilah and Peola as characters, their Janus-faced
connection was resonant to Black moviegoers who knew all too well the political
realities beneath these symbols of “Old” and “New” Black American life.
The
thoroughgoing complexity and irreconcilability of Imitation of Life make it an
essential American film. It grasps toward a confrontation with realities that
many Americans still find dangerous yet difficult to name. Reading it with and
against its early twentieth-century grain is likewise essential as we, nearly
one hundred years after this version’s release, still struggle to define
ourselves in the light of what gender, class, work, and especially race has
meant to being American.
Imitation
of Life: On Passing Between. By Miriam J. Petty. Criterion, January 10, 2023.
Halfway
through John M. Stahl’s Only Yesterday (1933), there’s a line of dialogue you
might not be expecting to hear. Young Mary Lane, pregnant after a night’s
adventure with a dashing soldier, has been sent to New York to stay with her
Aunt Julia, a suffragette with a roomy apartment. With her military man now off
to Europe, Mary is feeling hopeless, but Julia talks her down: “This sort of
thing is no longer a tragedy. It is not even good melodrama. It’s just
something that happened.”
Rest
assured that Stahl does take full advantage of the coincidences, burning
secrets, and crushing tragedy that power melodrama. You can read it in the
titles of his silent films, among them Greater Than Love (1919), Women Men
Forget (1920) and The Child Thou Gavest Me (1921). But Aunt Julia’s phrase
(“just something that happened”) captures the particular clear-eyed gaze that
Stahl brings to his best-known stories of forbearance. In the selection of
1930s and ’40s Stahl highlights showing at Metrograph, people face up to the
agonies of abandonment and regret, whether at the mercy of lovers or prey to
their own gnawing memories. They don’t just wallow for our delectation, they
push ahead and, above all, deal with the world as it is.
Stahl grew up on the Lower East Side in New York, pushing ahead himself after his family emigrated in 1893 from his birthplace in Baku, Azerbaijan (then part of the Russian Empire). He began as an actor, then directed silents, becoming established enough to be one of the 36 founding members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927. Quickly making his mark in the sound era as well, he made three films centering on adultery: Back Street (1932), Only Yesterday (1933) and Seed (1931), the hardest of these films to track down. Each feels grounded in the lived experience of their scandalized women in a plainspoken way that is downright disarming.
Despite all that’s thrown at them, Stahl’s women are forces of nature that elicit admiration rather than pity as victims of fate. In Only Yesterday, we first see Mary (Margaret Sullavan, making one of cinema’s great debuts) as an incandescent partygoer who finagles a dance with handsome Jim Everson (Stahl stalwart John Boles). That leads to a romantic night by the lake, with, afterwards, a pre-Code quip about the sash on her dress hanging untied on the walk back. Mary doesn’t see Jim again till after Armistice Day, which is also the birthday of their baby son, and after tracking him down at a parade, she is mortified by the conquering hero’s total lack of recognition. In the time leaps that follow, she raises a decent kid (always seen, poignantly, in uniform for military school) and runs a dress shop, and to outward appearances enjoys the boisterous company of her aunt and a circle of friends.
Mary is one
of Stahl’s many independent, resourceful women, her story drawn (though
uncredited) from Stefan Zweig’s novella Letter from an Unknown Woman, which had
been recently translated into English. Only Yesterday sets the story just as
the 1929 crash is happening, and within the first few minutes, someone commits
suicide in the bathroom, news of which Stahl disconcertedly lets hang in the
air while a racily dialogued party takes place at Jim’s (complete with Frank
Pangborn flinging one-liners). Jim reads the anonymous letter of the Zweig
title—Mary’s, of course—just as he is sitting at his desk to stare down the
barrel of his own pistol. He and Mary do meet again after Armistice Day, but
still he does not recognize her, even as he takes her to his second apartment,
spouting romantic pap.
Stahl
grasps that feelings are facts and he places them alongside other facts of
existence, instead of settling into the grooves one might have learned from
other woman’s pictures. Made just a year earlier, Back Street (1932, from the
1931 novel by Fannie Hurst) features Irene Dunne as Ray, the kept woman of a
married banker, Walter (Boles as well); they miss their chance at a connection
in Ohio, but remain tethered across the decades. For years, she lives in the
shadows, discouraged from pursuing her own livelihood, and declining the chance
of a safe marriage to an old friend. And
yet Ray’s love for Walter is not portrayed as a life wasted—even Walter’s
snippy son eventually fathoms the profundity of her bond with his
father—exemplifying the core Stahl philosophy that “both things can be true.”
The epitome
of this outlook could be Magnificent Obsession (1935), adapted from the book by
Lloyd C. Douglas (aka 12th Senior Minister at the First Congregational Church
of Akron, turned writer). Helen Hudson (Dunne) loses her husband when life-saving
medical equipment is deployed to aid a drunken “good for nothing boy” named
Robert Merrick (Robert Taylor). Yet Merrick ends up devoting himself to
becoming Helen’s savior after she is blinded, his youthful recklessness
alchemized into an ethos of selflessness.
Magnificent Obsession is often overshadowed by Douglas Sirk’s ripe 1954 retelling, but Stahl’s original encapsulates a reflection ongoing in his oeuvre—on the roads not taken, and the ways we do or do not resign ourselves to our paths. He has often been treated as the straight arrow to Sirk’s knowing irony—possibly out of a lingering disrespect for melodrama generally—but even Stahl’s lesser-known works find some intriguing effects resulting from his style, favoring longer takes of people together over glam close-ups. In When Tomorrow Comes (1939), Stahl’s plainspoken approach transforms what seems at first a romantic comedy, pairing the ever-insouciant Charles Boyer and Dunne, as they were in Love Affair earlier that same year. They meet in a restaurant—Helen, an affable waitress (Dunne); Philip, an idle concert pianist who turns out to own a Long Island mansion (Boyer)—and pass gradually into a will-they-or-won’t-they limbo. The film does not ignite the way one might expect after they spend a night together in a church during a hurricane. Instead, Stahl lets their tentative connection drift right smack into the reality of Boyer’s wife, Madeleine (Barbara O’Neil): a woman suffering severe mental distress after the death of her baby.
Instead of the usual do-si-do of guilty passion, we’re confronted with Madeleine showing up at Helen’s door. In a scene fascinatingly staged in a straightforward two-shot, one actress facing the other, Madeleine explains her helplessness and why Helen should step away. The film’s romantic dreams evaporate in the moment, and one can almost see Helen figuring out how to react. Dunne’s treatment of ambivalence and hard-won wisdom throughout her Stahl roles has a legible interiority that truly feels as if it comes from within rather than from the romantic projections of the genre. It’s also worth mentioning how When Tomorrow Comes begins, which tends to get written out of some summaries: Helen works at a restaurant chain that drives its employees too hard. She attends a union solidarity meeting (where Philip sneaks in) and becomes a hero for a speech rallying her fellow workers, without the whole episode turning hokey-jokey.
Stahl’s routine portrayal of the strike makes it feel like an ordinary part of their lives, even as it serves its purpose in the plot. The same straightforward approach to social circumstances can be found at work in Imitation of Life (1934), where the lives of Delilah (Louise Beavers), a Black housekeeper, and her daughter Peola (Fredi Washington) are constrained and determined by a racist social order. That is the case even as Delilah works for Bea (Claudette Colbert), a fair-minded and caring white businesswoman who treats her and Peola as friends and family. Yet the smallest decision in the movie is affected by this national fact; when Bea first offers to pay for Delilah’s streetcar fare home, Delilah politely declines (“We has to walk”). Stahl presents this societal reality without real comment, viewing the lighter-skinned Peola’s anger over her situation (“I want to be white, like I look”) through Delilah’s maternal protectiveness and Bea’s concern as a friend. Bea makes a fortune off Delilah’s family pancake recipe, but their attachment remains unshakable, even as they end up living at the same tony New York address.
When Bea’s own daughter, Jessie (Rochelle Hudson), is in town from school, Bea leaves her at home while she helps Delilah track down Peola who has fled out of continuing frustration with the inequality she cannot entirely escape. Stahl’s steady hand juggles the very different stakes for these two mother-daughter pairs with compassion, while Beavers navigates a tricky characterization with a clarity of focus, emphasizing a love and groundedness in such devastating moments as when she tracks down Peola working as a restaurant hostess and her daughter refuses to acknowledge her. The matter-of-factness of her performance and Stahl’s direction capture the iniquity of the situation, in a way that feels more immediate in conveying the commonness of the experience than playing up the injustice might have. Ultimately the film safely settles on maternal love as its lodestar, at once transcendent and mundane, ending on a goofy detail from Jessie’s childhood.
The 1940s
films in the program find Stahl’s clear-eyed view of the world somewhat
complicated by the demands of burgeoning Hollywood archetypes. Both Holy
Matrimony (1943) and The Keys of the Kingdom (1944) center on a recurring
figure in Hollywood—the oddball/outsider idealist—but in two divergent
personalities and actors. In Holy Matrimony, Monty Woolley (a year after laying
waste to a Midwestern family in The Man Who Came to Dinner as sardonic radio
personality Sheridan Whiteside) plays “England’s greatest painter,” Priam
Farll. The great man makes a split-second decision to fake his own death by
assuming the identity of his freshly deceased valet. No one in England is the
wiser since artist and valet had for several years been living on a tropical
island, and the film becomes a comedic study of a stubborn man of principle,
when Priam is found out and embroiled in a court trial. Stahl also leans into
the predicament of Priam’s humble partner, Alice, who finds herself saddled
with the role of “wife of a great man,” though remarkably here the marital
dynamics feel somehow more retrograde than in Stahl’s 1930s works. (In Seed,
for example, see how Stahl treats its story of a writer, his long-suffering
wife and many children, and an old flame.)
In The Keys
of the Kingdom, Gregory Peck embodies an upstanding Scottish priest who builds
a congregation in the Chinese province to which he’s been sent, earning respect
even from the squad of nuns who eventually join him. Peck’s Francis is a humble
man, down to earth in his dealings, averse to any pretension whatsoever—a
marked contrast to Vincent Price’s visiting priest, Angus, who glad-hands and
speaks fluently the language of subtle power-brokering. Written, like
Magnificent Obsession, by a religious leader turned novelist (A.J. Cronin), it
can have the air of an exemplary fable, though Stahl’s faith in an essential
human decency anchors the film (and, in the realm of “the world as it is,” he
can downplay Francis’s action-hero involvement in a guerrilla sneak attack on
imperialist Chinese forces).
A wrenching
course correction in mood, Leave Her to Heaven (1945) has long stood alone as a
mesmerizing and chilling classic. Often treated as an outlier in his work, this
is a Technicolor portrait of a maleficent obsession. Placidly gorgeous Ellen
Berent (Gene Tierney) quite literally wants novelist Richard Harland (Cornel
Wilde) all to herself, to the extent of having a deadly jealousy of his
physically disabled brother, Danny (Darryl Hickman), and her own doting cousin
Ruth (Jeanne Crain). First the Harland lakeside house in Maine becomes a
fortress of solitude, and then the Harland family homestead is stifled by
Ellen’s raging neurosis. Leave Her to Heaven is routinely called a noir, but in
Stahl’s hands becomes something even stranger and more unnerving—it’s tempting
to read the film as a skeptic’s gloss on the genre’s seductive bad vibes.
Any one of
Ellen’s audacious actions would be sufficient for an entire film, but each is
treated coolly as an object of morbid fascination for the hurt caused. Even the
couple’s first meet-cute or meet-risqué on a train quietly becomes more like a
meet-demonic as Ellen simply stares at Richard for an unnervingly length of
time. Yet Stahl stays true to individual perspectives, holding both that
Ellen’s positively Medean possessiveness can’t be ignored and that Ruth might
indeed harbor affection for Richard. Where do Ellen’s actions leave them, and
us? Not to heaven, perhaps, but with the sense that in life, sometimes survival
itself is—must be—enough.
The World As It Is : On the unsentimental melodramas of John M. Stahl. By Nicolas Rapold. Metrograph, February 2, 2022.
This new
collection of original essays on underrated Hollywood alumnus John M. Stahl is
an index and critique of a filmmaker who David Thomson called out for
reappraising decades ago (Thomson, 1994: 710-711). At that point even Andrew
Sarris’s appreciation of Stahl, whom that writer classified under the rubric
‘Expressive Esoterica’ (concerning “unsung directors with difficult styles or unfashionable
genres or both,” reprinted in Roud, 1980: 946-949) had not generated a
recuperating of the director despite the newly minted status of the
rediscovered woman’s picture. Stahl is frequently mentioned as a sort of
subordinate figure to Douglas Sirk, who remade three of Stahl’s great Thirties
films (Magnificent Obsession,; Imitation of Life; and When Tomorrow Comes , as
Interlude, foundational works of movie melodrama) and whose own long life led
to his being re-evaluated, celebrated and reincarnated as a kind of cult icon
of ironic drama. Stahl, in stark contrast, died while still active aged
sixty-three in 1950.
Making the
argument for a director as auteur – a coherent aesthetic sensibility through
which perspective an entire body of work is judged that of a singular
authoritative control – is replete with difficulties, not least in the heavily
producer-led studio system; still less with the paucity of personal information
available in this case. No interviews with contemporaries were extant, few
colleagues survive and despite their vast collaborative successes in the 1930s,
Irene Dunne said he was horrible to work with. It may well be that it was not
just the fate of his films but his commitment to exploring women’s experiences
led to his being sidelined in the major film histories.
From his
first film proper Wives of Men (1918), Stahl was writer and director. If
melodrama is the major cinematic mode, then its most common iteration and the
type with which Stahl was associated from the Twenties onwards was the woman’s
picture, despite his early demonstrable tendency toward a realistic, even
semi-documentary approach. It is perhaps more appropriate to describe him as
someone who is interested in the lives of women (145).
The intention
of this volume, which consists of analysis of all of his films, half of which
have been out of circulation since their original release, is to set out
chronologically the complete career of a key Hollywood figure who was producer,
director and screenwriter. The tone is set in the introductory essays by the
editors, whose inspiration for this collection came from double Stahl
retrospectives at Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato (the sound films) and
Pordenone’s Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (the silent films) and it should be
noted that some of the essays here were written prior to the films’
restoration. As the programme for the former festival states,
“The
turbulent and tender world he depicts has at its centre women, often working
together and living alone. Active participants in a society undergoing change,
they are portrayed by some of the most glamorous screen icons – with a rare
sense of ease. According to Gene Tierney, Stahl was “for bringing out the best
in an actress”. (Ehsan Khoshbakht, 2018: unpaginated)
The book is
divided in two roughly equal parts, dealing firstly with Stahl’s silent output
from 1914. Collectively these accounts not only summarise the narratives and
contemporary reception, they also provide analysis of formal and stylistic
attributes of work which was until recently lost, for the most part, another
factor in the problem recuperating the director. Of historic interest also is
his long association with Louis B. Mayer and repeat collaborations with
screenwriters like his wife, Paul Bern and Bess Meredyth.
In Her Code of Honor (1919), we see tropes that would become familiar from a study of Stahl’s output – characteristic staging, mother-daughter doubling, a wife and mistress meeting, secrets, revelations and questions of identity and parentage (46), with co-editor Charles Barr identifying what would become a standard element of Stahl’s films, “the power of the encompassing image” (47), an idea that cuts through the historicising to create the crux of the director’s signature.
Perhaps the
most fluent interpretations of Stahl’s work come from Imogen Sara Smith, one of
three contributors who delved into the archives to view the lost films (along
with Pamela Hutchinson and Lea Jacobs). Her essays clarify those connections
between the early silents of which we know only the summaries and reviews, and
the later, better known, sound output. The director’s attributes are summarised
by Smith, who writes,
“ Stahl’s
greatest gifts as a director were the restraint and unforced sympathy he brought
to melodramas, the tact and sincerity that allow nuance to emerge from
formulaic or contrived plot twists…There is something in Stahl’s
straightforwardness that deepens even flimsy characters and plots, an eye
always patiently on the lookout for what is real” (149).
This is
perhaps the best way to encapsulate the contribution of a Hollywood filmmaker
whose most compelling trait was restraint in the face of overwhelming emotion.
The Woman
Under Oath (1919) is a lurid courtroom tale with an almost impenetrable
flashback which confused and irritated critics but Pamela Hutchinson locates
its strengths as a female-led melodrama, in which “the truth of the case rests
entirely in facts that are perceived by women rather than by men” (52). She
states clearly of Stahl’s films that they “are renowned for sympathetic, if
flawed, female protagonists, and for featuring characters that stick to their
convictions” (53).
The
screenplays for The Song of Life (1922) and One Clear Call (1922) were written
by Bess Meredyth, whose realistic style assisted in the shaping of Stahl’s
approach to melodramatic material, with a reviewer of his next production The
Dangerous Age (1922) commenting that “Stahl generally starts his productions
where other directors leave off” (86). He was by now a director of some
distinction. In her assessment of Why Men Leave Home (1924), Smith comments of
this marital comedy in which Stahl managed to bypass censorship that the script
by A.P. Younger from Avery Hopwood’s play “manages to place responsibility on
men” (94) in what was a fairly typical divorce scenario of the time. Of
Husbands and Lovers (1924), Smith says of his next remarriage comedy it has “a
high degree of polish and a slightly sour Tone” (95). She states that he makes
something Shakespearean of the highly contrived situation “by cloaking it in
beautifully cinematic style” (98). In the second version of the film (Husband
and Wives # 2), Barr describes in his essay (with the helpful inclusion of
stills) what are by now standardised images in Stahl’s body of work and his
formal visual strategy, a type which would later be attributed to William
Wyler’s preference for deep staging with cinematographer Gregg Toland:
“The camera
never once moves, the combination of deep/wide composition with judicious
editing makes the footage that follows into a small masterclass of expressive
staging (101) .”
Barr
concludes:
“The
skilled integration of these two levels of cross-cutting makes this final
section – almost devoid of intertitles – a fine demonstration of Stahl’s
methods, and altogether a classic illustration of the power of the mature
silent medium (104).”
Stahl’s
status was such that playwright Robert Sherwood could comment of him in 1926,
“I can see
no reason why he should not qualify as a member of that small group of
progressive directors who constitute the hope of the silent drama (108).”
He was by
now exhibiting a shift in his work, with the final Stahl/Mayer production
Memory Lane (1926) demonstrating “a new sort of plot and a new way of creating
affecting scenes”(109), according to Jacobs, the first indicator of the great
melodramas he would make at Universal. Pardoxically, his work in comedies with
screenwriter Benjamin Glazer would play a role in forming this new approach
which critics appreciated as having the touch of the ‘Viennese school’ or what
latterly became known as ‘the Lubitsch touch’ (112). (This didn’t stop him
colluding with Mayer to supplement the master’s own The Student Prince (1927)
with a risible and utterly unnecessary love interest sequence added in
post-production.)
Any
director who considers the job completed when his pictures is filmed and edited
shirks his full responsibility (126).
It was in
the sound era and his move to Universal where he really came into his own,
making a series of masterpieces rooted in female experience and reflecting
social issues.
Seed (1931)
picks apart men’s attitudes to women by placing John Boles between two – his
self-sacrificing wife and the mistress who believed in his writing talent prior
to his dreary marriage. Adapted from a novel by social realist Charles Norris,
it sees Stahl negotiating the tricky issue of female love rivals who ironically
find common ground in a narrative of independent women.
Charles
Barr’s essay on Only Yesterday (1933) is a reading of an arresting Pre-Code
film which was nominally adapted by William Hurlbut, Arthur Richman and George
O’Neil from the non-fiction bestseller about the Twenties by Frederick Lewis
Allen. However, it is clearly a plot with a heavy debt to Stefan Zweig’s
recently translated Letter from an Unknown Woman (which would be
straightforwardly and very differently adapted by Max Ophüls fifteen years
later). Nowadays this film is chiefly of interest as the screen debut of
Margaret Sullavan who Stahl had discovered on Broadway. She is extraordinarily
charismatic as the innocent young woman who has a one-night stand with cad John
Boles and their next meeting is two years later, when she has given birth to
his illegitimate son without shame and he doesn’t even remember her, in a plot
twist reminiscent of Stahl’s earlier The Child Thou Gavest Me (1921). He
proceeds to become a wealthy banker contemplating suicide in the midst of the
Wall Street Crash when a letter from the mother of his child stops him in his
tracks. With its horrendous anti-hero and a suffragist aunt (Billie Burke)
making proto-feminist assertions, Barr makes the case for this being among the
best films of the Thirties. I’m not sure that it is, but as a narrative of
illegitimacy and men and women’s very different perceptions and experiences of
romantic love, it’s very well dramatised, filled with moments of truth. Some
key lines on contemporary womanhood are delivered by Billie and allude
ironically to the narrative’s manipulative construction: It’s just another of
those biological events… It isn’t even good melodrama. It’s just something that
happened. As Barr points out, there is little indication of WW1 in terms of
costume, everything including cosmetics and costume speaks to the time in which
it was made, but the characterisation is everything – Sullavan is incandescent,
the rather boring Boles is a nasty piece of work, Burke is a shot of lightning
through the story. Barr locates in its narrative those feminine values that
make a difference: it is this that is the film’s triumph (171).
Just as
Thomson remarks, most of us come to Stahl’s career in reverse, and the sound
films made his name with a series of crowd pleasers (Thomson: 711) . In her
reading of Back Street (1932) (from the Fannie Hurst novel), Jacobs sums up the
director’s changing style as ‘a dedramatised mode of narration,’ as effective a
descriptor as any of this mode of flattening out which permits emotions to
shine in this highly socio-sexual film:
Other films
of that period including Back Street (1935) and When Tomorrow Comes (1939) are
notable for their apparent seriousness. However Tom Ryan’s analysis of the
former (an adaptation of the novel by pastor Lloyd C. Douglas with twelve
credited screenwriters) discovers in Stahl’s visual language that the
camerawork (by John J. Mescall) using two- and three-shots in verbal exchanges,
destabilises sympathy towards a single protagonist and he comments of Stahl’s
overall approach “it’s as if he has set out to drain the material of as much of
its melodrama as possible” (181); while the shift in narrative control is
towards Helen (Irene Dunne) and not Robert (Robert Taylor). The finale “raises
a knowing eyebrow at the happy ending which it confers on the lovers with its
reference to the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale in its closing sequence” (185). The
production had originally been intended for Frank Borzage to direct, but
Warners would not release him for the job; Borzage would go on to direct three
other films adapted from the same author’s novels. Ryan finds that “given the
transcendental romanticism that drives his work, it’s much more likely that he
would have played it straight rather than reshaping it the way that Stahl does”
(181). In the interpretation directed by Douglas Sirk two decades later, the
melodramatic tropes are articulated in a way which Stahl’s treatment simply
refuses. As Ryan states, “the Stahl film’s reshaping of the material has
resulted in the telling of a very different kind of story from the one told by
the novel” (185). We might perhaps infer that while Stahl wanted to communicate
honest emotion, Sirk was more inclined to undercut his characters and subvert
the very notion of melodrama using its own mechanisms. Stahl’s narrative
grammar is minimal and economical, as he himself said, “emotion takes the place
of action”. Sarris describes the difference between their respective affect as
“the difference between the emotional social consciousness of the 30s and the
stylistic self-consciousness of the 50s. Whereas Stahl’s treatments are warmer,
Sirk’s are wittier. Stahl possessed the audacity of Sirk but not the dark
humour” (Roud: 946).
Stahl owed
MGM a film and made the atypical Irish political biography Parnell (1937)
starring Clark Gable: its failure might reflect the conditions in which he was
forced to produce it and it remains an oddity in terms of romantic drama. In
Edward Gallefent’s reading of 1939’s When Tomorrow Comes (based on a James M.
Cain story, ‘The Modern Cinderella’ ) for Universal Pictures, the author
identifies another trope of Stahl’s films: to open on a crowd and then focus on
protagonists who are isolated from the social world (198). Here, it is an
adulterous couple (Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne) isolated first by their love
affair, then by her post-partum madness following a stillbirth. The film is
punctuated by meals and storms (whilst sailing), juxtaposing commonplace ritual
with metaphor and danger.
From Universal, Stahl went first to Columbia where he shot an adaptation of the play Our Wife (1941); then to Twentieth Century-Fox where he would stay for the remainder of this career and make nine films, commencing with Immortal Sergeant (1943) from a screenplay by Lamar Trotti, one of that studio’s top writers. This combat film got an excellent reception from critics and audience alike. Jeremy Arnold finds it a particularly well unified work despite a complicated play of point of view, filled with flashback, contrast and juxtaposition, between Libyan desert and home front scenes. The author credits Stahl with subtle craftsmanship beyond the film’s immediate propaganda value: “he places equal weight – visually and emotionally – on the material before and after, letting the transition itself create the ‘audacious’ effect.” He continues:
“… Stahl
even favours lengthy three-shots, with all three characters figuring equally in
the frame. As a result the audience effectively observes from a distance the
characters enacting a scene, rather than participating solely through Colin’s
[Henry Fonda] perspective. In other words, Stahl creates an objective point of
view: our engagement is less of feeling Colin’s reactions – his helplessness
and uncertainty – and more of observing that he has those reactions (212).”
Working
with that elegant stylist Nunnally Johnson on his next production, the
much-filmed Arnold Bennett adaptation Holy Matrimony (1943), Lawrence Napper
states that recent scholarship sees in this identity-swap story Stahl
“reworking in comic mode of some of the preoccupations of his more famous
melodramas” (217).
Returning
to the theme of war, The Eve of St Mark (1944) is George Seaton’s adaptation of
the Maxwell Anderson play and Jeremy Arnold’s analysis explores the impact of
Stahl’s approach to staging (two shots, a lack of crosscutting) that may have
been born of his theatrical background but is here exploited cinematically to
devastating emotional effect.
The Keys of
the Kingdom (1944) is a complex and reverent production adapted from the A.J.
Cronin source novel by Nunnally Johnson and rewritten by producer Joseph
Mankiewicz to the specifications of studio head Darryl F. Zanuck, all strong
authorial figures in their own right, to the point that Tim Cawkwell admits
Stahl “can, at first sight, be felt to be missing” (223) in Fox’s second most
expensive film that year (after Wilson). However Cawkwell finds that “the film
most comes to life, when Cronin’s contempt for arrogance and hypocrisy
coincides with Stahl’s ability to portray the brittleness behind success”
(226).
If the
aforementioned Thomson can delineate Stahl’s full-blooded Leave Her to Heaven
(1945) as “a film seemingly made in a trance and best seen in a state of
fever”, the work of “a thrilling artist in the cause of self-destructive
Technicolor emotionalism” (1994: 710), then Michael Walker‘s essay is
structured primarily from a familiar Oedipal perspective, taking the usual
position against the glorious Ellen Berent (Gene Tierney): male viewers rarely
notice what women immediately recognise – that Jeanne Crain sets her cap at
Cornel Wilde from the get-go and plays a very long game! Walker makes
entertaining structural and generic points about what is now Stahl’s most
famous film, creating a format to find useful commonalities with Sirk’s Written
on the Wind (1955). The production’s overwhelming beauty, transgressiveness and
ironic stance towards each character makes it a classic of Forties cinema and
much more besides. It is this production that makes Martin Scorsese use colour
in a certain way, his regular claims for the production surely having made other
cinéphiles sit up and take notice despite the view that dismissed Stahl to the
backwater of maternal melodrama, yet it is of course entirely atypical of his
work as a whole.
The Foxes
of Harrow (1947) is another adaptation, this time a greatly condensed iteration
of Frank Yerby’s popular novel and as a film concerning race received mixed
reviews in an era very different from the seemingly more progressive Thirties,
eliciting criticism of its failings in comparison with Gone With the Wind
(1939). Adrian Garvey describes it as a typical late-period Stahl film,
beautifully made and rather ornate, demonstrating “his nuanced exploration of
emotion alongside flourishes of melodramatic excess” (246) even if it might
suffer in relation to the earlier Imitation of Life (1934), a ground-breaking
work which retains its startling freshness to this day. Working again with
Lamar Trotti on an adaptation of The Walls of Jericho (1946), Stahl’s talents
measure up somewhat poorly against his previous success with Leave Her to
Heaven with which this shares some elements including the scheming heroine
(played by Linda Darnell when Gene Tierney refused it and was suspended) and
Cornel Wilde as the male lead, yet Melanie Williams and Neil Sinyard find
(echoing Barr) that “Stahl can compress a lot of meaning into a single unforced
image” (249). As co-editor Bruce Babington notes, Stahl’s penultimate film,
Father Was a Fullback (1949) brought the director into the unplumbed territory
of the family comedy and it’s an agreeable watch, mostly notable for a terrific
performance by a young Natalie Wood but as the author comments, “much of the
charm … comes from its idealised reflection of recognisable familial
experiences” (255). Babington also covers what turned out to be Stahl’s final
production, a nostalgic musical biopic based on the life and career of Fred
Fisher, the Tin Pan Alley composer of Oh, You Beautiful Doll (1949). Stahl had
previous connections with musicals he either came close to making or was
associated with during production, credited or otherwise, but here the numbers
are small-scale and intimate with only the title song getting a theatrical
staging. Babington says the film’s other distinguishing feature lies in its
“finding charm in modesty” (259). It seems an apposite way to conclude Stahl’s
career.
The value
of this expansive book lies in the raft of accumulated detail on productions;
the aesthetic connections made between the largely unknown silent work with the
later, splashier films of the sound era; the tantalising prospect of
rediscovered works; and the commitment by fourteen authors to establishing
Stahl’s filmmaking profile which is so strong and personable that it determines
the consistency over the films, powering the book’s own engine of discovery. We
are a long way from Sarris’ declaration of Stahl as “a middle-range director of
impressive sobriety and intensity throughout a career ranging from 1914 to
1947” (Roud, 1980: 946). In such a wide-ranging assemblage of writing style the
cohesiveness of concern stems not merely from the melodramatic mode and its
expressivity but from an interrogation of Stahl’s distinctive visual mastery,
considering the overall concerns and themes not just as director and writer but
as producer, whether one subscribes to the principles of auteurism or not. In
contributing such a profound historical basis for future analysis of his role
in Hollywood and cataloguing otherwise unknown films in an accessible format,
with many narrative and stylistic linkages traced throughout the oeuvre, this
proves that Stahl’s place in film history has been neglected for far too long.
It is the consistency – particularly in the choice of material and a preference
for unshowy staging – that makes Stahl worthy of the appellation auteur. In his
lifetime he was highly regarded, highly paid and something of a maverick in the
intensity with which he viewed the world sympathetically from a woman’s
perspective, evident in his earliest filmmaking days, moving from a
semi-documentary approach to a spare, deliberate style that foregrounded
feeling. This fascinating anthology proves John Libbey’s claim, that Stahl is a
Neglected Master.
Thankfully,
all has not been lost. In his introduction, Charles Barr explains the origins
of the volume’s title, which comes from the first of Stahl’s surviving films,
Her Code of Honor (1919): “When the call of the heart is heard all else is
forgotten” (9). Now we know the essence of the man: he was painfully sincere.
The Call of
the Heart : John M. Stahl and Hollywood Melodrama. Bruce Babington and Charles Barr (eds), East
Barnet, Hertfordshire, John Libbey Publishing,
Pp vii +.250 + 12 pages of colour plates
The Call of the Heart: John M. Stahl and Hollywood Melodrama. Review. By Elaine Lennon. Offscreen, January, 2020
Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now coming to light; new biographical information complicates the picture of his life, while the re-emergence of his early films confirms his essential qualities as an artist. Best known for his 1930s women’s pictures made at Universal (Imitation of Life, Magnificent Obsession) and his Technicolor noir Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Stahl was a major filmmaker in the silent era, but until recently it was assumed that his pre-sound films were nearly all lost or unavailable. In fact, many were sitting quietly in archives like the Library of Congress: more than half of the director’s twenty-two silent features are now known to survive, and all but two of these were screened in 2018 at festivals in Pordenone and Bologna. The sense of excitement and discovery, of pieces falling into place, was worthy of a recognition scene Stahl himself might have directed. These early works reveal that the director’s unsentimental humanism and radical empathy for women were there from the start, and they show him swiftly developing his control of tone and plot mechanics, while exhibiting enough trademark motifs and elements of style—disrupted weddings, deep focus compositions—to satisfy the most exacting auteurist.
John
Malcolm Stahl was a handsome, energetic-looking man whose face often appeared
on advertisements for his movies in the 1920s. His name and crown of silver
hair seem vaguely patrician; he always claimed to have been born in New York in
1886. In fact, it is almost certain that he was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, as
Jacob Morris Strelitzsky, and that he emigrated to the United States as a
child. When he died in 1950, a lawsuit filed by his only child, from the first
of three marriages, challenged his will, claiming that Stahl’s third wife had
coerced him into leaving his entire estate to her by threatening to expose his
real background—as well as the fact that in his youth he had been jailed for
unspecified crimes under various aliases. Beyond these tantalizing fragments,
almost nothing is known about Stahl’s early life, his family, when he came to
America, or how he wound up on the stage, and then in films, as an actor.
(Bruce Babington presents his invaluable research on Stahl’s life and on his
still-missing silent films in The Call of the Heart: John M. Stahl and
Hollywood Melodrama, a new collection of writing on the director that he edited
with Charles Barr and to which I contributed.)
Even
Stahl’s first directing credit is uncertain. He claimed it was a now-lost 1914
film called The Boy and the Law, which resonates with his mysterious biography.
It follows a Jewish boy who escapes anti-Semitic persecution in Russia, becomes
a poolroom delinquent in America, and is set on the right course by Judge
Willis Brown—a self-promoting social reformer who wrote and starred as himself
in the film. Stahl was uncredited on his first surviving work, The Lincoln
Cycle, a series of ten related short films, but he publicly declared himself
the director when the cycle was first released in 1917, and continued to do so
throughout his career without being contradicted. The eight surviving episodes
were the earliest films shown in a Stahl retrospective at the thirty-seventh
edition of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, the Pordenone Silent Film Festival,
this past October.
On paper,
The Lincoln Cycle does not sound very promising. The films were conceived by
Benjamin Chapin, an actor who had made a theatrical career of impersonating
Abraham Lincoln, and who was such a towering egotist that he refused to give
screen credit to any of his fellow actors or his director. (“Chapin won’t be
satisfied until he’s assassinated,” quipped John Barrymore.) In the 1920s, the
films were reissued for the educational market under the title “The Son of
Democracy.” These facts suggest a vanity project, and perhaps a stodgy
historical tableau, so the delicacy, freshness, and sophistication of the films
came as a pleasant surprise at Pordenone—rewarding those jet-lagged North
American attendees who dragged themselves to the 9 a.m. screenings.
It is
tempting, though speculative, to see some of Stahl’s signature virtues in these
films—the restraint and tenderness with which he handles emotional moments, his
ability to balance drama and light humor, and his interest in the way the past
shapes and overshadows the present. Flashbacks are the structuring mechanism of
these films, and like John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), they suggest that
our greatest president’s character was honed and revealed in seemingly minor vignettes
and anecdotes of his life. The Lincoln Cycle is also a lyrical meditation on
the power of memory. In each thirty-minute film, the wartime president faces
some challenge or dilemma that sparks the recollection of an episode in his
earlier life, or the lives of his forbears. Several of the best episodes (My
Mother and Tender Memories) dwell on Lincoln’s relationship with his adored
mother (Madelyn Clare) and his inconsolable grief at her death. The films’
locations add a striking naturalism and solemnity: bleak, wintry woods and
fields represent the rough-hewn surroundings of Lincoln’s childhood and the
battlefields of the Civil War, strewn with dead soldiers as in a Mathew Brady
photograph. These landscapes are far removed from the affluent urban settings
of Stahl’s later women’s pictures, but the clear-eyed, warm-hearted depictions
of family relationships and children’s emotional lives look forward to films
such as Seed (1931) and Imitation of Life (1934).
The eight
Stahl features in the Pordenone retrospective were shown in chronological
order, making it easy to trace his path from heavy, operatic melodrama to the
deft blending of comedy and heartache. (Another silent, The Woman Under Oath
[1919], was shown earlier this year at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna as part
of a series that sampled the director’s entire career.) The early films are
rife with lurid plot elements and violent, traumatic revelations. In Her Code
of Honor (1919), a woman is horrified to realize that her fiancé is,
apparently, her brother, the son of the cad who abandoned her pregnant mother.
In The Child Thou Gavest Me (1921), the heroine first discovers—on her wedding
day, no less—that the illegitimate child she believed died at birth is still
alive, and later faces the realization that the man who raped her in a wartime
field hospital is . . . but I won’t spoil it. In Sowing the Wind (1921), a man
determined to break up his foster son’s romance with the daughter of a
notorious demimondaine finds out that she is really . . . I won’t spoil that
either, though you can probably guess. It’s little wonder that suicide often
seems like the best way out for these people. But the stories don’t follow
their premises to the bitter end; instead they tamp down emotional eruptions
with glib explanations, gestures of forgiveness, and turn-on-a-dime character
transformations.
Wild
coincidences abound. A woman abandons her baby in a moment of desperation, and
decades later winds up living above her now grown son in a Lower East Side
tenement (The Song of Life, 1922). In Suspicious Wives (a.k.a. Greater Than
Love, 1921), the coincidences become so improbable, and the plot machinery so
labored, that the intertitles comment on it with the introduction of a “demon”
representing fate, laughing as it plays with its victims. (Many of the films,
including this one, feature beautifully illustrated and lettered art titles.)
As critic Pamela Hutchinson has pointed out, these ludicrous plot twists also
present well-crafted narrative and thematic symmetries. Like some of
Shakespeare’s most far-fetched plots, they belong to a tradition of narratives
in which reality bends to emotional and moral imperatives: the need for
resolution, for the truth to emerge, for justice to be served. Is this not, at
least in part, what stories—and melodramas in particular—are for?
All of
these films, even the less successful ones, have some of the Stahlian
qualities, the emotional clarity and force, that would emerge fully in his
masterworks, for instance the trio starring Irene Dunne—Back Street (1932),
Magnificent Obsession (1935), and When Tomorrow Comes (1939)—whose influence would
spread throughout the family tree of melodrama, from Douglas Sirk’s remakes to
the work of directors, from Fassbinder to Todd Haynes, inspired by Sirk.
High among Stahl’s virtues is a commitment to exploring women’s experience. With his very first official credit, Wives of Men (1918, presumed lost), Stahl began partnering with strong female stars, including several (Grace Davison, Anita Stewart) who acted as their own producers. Though forgotten today, they, like Stahl regulars Florence Reed and Mollie King, were highly regarded, and there is often something of the New Woman in their characters: Reed plays a famous novelist who becomes the first woman ever to sit on a criminal jury in The Woman Under Oath (something that did not actually happen in New York until decades later). Anita Stewart makes a ringing denunciation of sexual double standards in Sowing the Wind, telling the hypocritical man who objects to her marrying his son (but encourages the boy to sow his wild oats) that she will fight him, “sex against sex!” The Song of Life becomes a somewhat maudlin mother-love story, but it opens with a stark depiction of a woman breaking down under the strain of domestic drudgery.
Stahl’s
silents are caught somewhere between Victorian values of womanhood and the
critique of female self-sacrifice in his pre-Code dramas such as Seed, Back
Street, and Only Yesterday—still-modern films that are ambivalent but
empathetic in their treatment of women’s devotion, and unsparing in their
portrayal of men’s entitlement. In the silent era, Stahl’s favorite male actor
was Lewis Stone, whom he directed six times and seems to have valued for
Stone’s ability to portray varieties of masculine selfishness and insensitivity
while still retaining some audience sympathy—a gift John Boles did not bring to
the early sound melodramas. A former actor himself, Stahl usually drew natural
and deeply felt performances from his players, including children. He had a
keen eye for child and infant behavior, like the lonely little boy in The Child
Thou Gavest Me imitating kids he sees the street outside by shooting craps with
sugar cubes against his teddy bear, or the one-year-old who climbs on the table
at his birthday party and falls asleep with his face in the cake in Memory Lane
(1926).
A stubborn
perfectionist, Stahl was known for shooting far more footage than he wound up
using—a habit deplored by Louis B. Mayer, under whom the director had his own
unit beginning in 1921—and for his skill as an editor. His visual style stands
out in the silent features: his use of extreme deep focus; his love of window,
door, and mirror frames; his use of blocking to express relationships, as when
the love triangle in Husbands and Lovers (1924) becomes a literal triangle, the
two men seated on either side of a chess board and the woman at the apex
between them. There is a shot in The Child Thou Gavest Me where Lewis Stone
stands in the foreground, outside a doorway that frames, very far back, at the
foot of a staircase, his wife (Barbara Castleton), her child, and the man he
jealously fears may be the child’s father. Such moments are not showy, but
occasionally Stahl produces a bolder cinematic flourish, like the scene in The
Song of Life where a downtrodden housewife looks out of her shack and sees a
train passing, the windows like small movie screens showing fashionable women
drinking champagne—a device Clarence Brown would recreate in Possessed (1931).
In Husbands and Lovers, a scene of mistaken identity in a darkened room works
because of the virtuosic low lighting, which also evokes the somber mood of
this pivotal moment.
The
juxtaposition of formal, elegant framing and explosive emotion comes out in a
signature motif of Stahl’s silents: the disrupted wedding. The chocolate-box
perfection of these elaborate ceremonies—the garlands of flowers, the legions
of bridesmaids and groomsmen and tiny ring-bearers and flower girls, the solemn
step-together-step-together rhythm of the procession—serve to intensify the
effect when everything falls apart. Sometimes the disruption is played for
laughs (establishing what would become a convention in romantic comedy),
sometimes for shock (a fatal gun-shot at a wedding banquet, a long-lost child’s
reappearance), sometimes for the yearning regret of a rejected lover who
watches the spectacle from outside a window. While fancy weddings are rarer in
Stahl’s sound films, he would reuse some of these motifs: scenes of Lois
Wilson, as the mother in Seed, looking through windows at her children and her
estranged husband emphasize her isolation; in Only Yesterday, Margaret
Sullavan’s shattering realization that the father of her child doesn’t
recognize her comes amid a thronged military victory parade. Throughout his
career, Stahl would use simple, classical framing to contain and counterpoint
the violent emotions in his stories, giving his films a placid surface that
focuses and deepens the feeling beneath.
As Stahl
developed, big declamatory scenes that play to the balconies gave way to a
focus on detail and small but telling bits of business. This style takes hold
fully in the comedies of remarriage Why Men Leave Home (1924) and Husbands and
Lovers, which patiently depict the everyday lives of their characters. In
Stahl’s early films, his efforts to inject comic relief are sometimes jarringly
abrupt, but by Memory Lane he has fully mastered tonal shifts, so that the film
moves easily back and forth between witty humor and bittersweet melancholy.
Gone are the plot turns that loom on the horizon; the story is unpredictable in
the best way, the characters consistently surprising yet always convincing in
their behavior. Eleanor Boardman stars as a woman who gets engaged to a dull
but dependable man (Conrad Nagel) when her first love (William Haines) leaves
town, only to have him reappear on the eve of her wedding, tormenting her with
second thoughts and casting a shadow over the start of her marriage. It is a
simple story without dramatic twists of fate, but it is daring in the way it
forces us to like and feel for both men, and to accept that life rarely
supplies resolution, truth, and justice. Here Stahl has matured into a
filmmaker who ranks with Mikio Naruse as an artist of tender irony and
heartbreaking reserve.
The Birth
of a Quiet Radical: John M. Stahl’s Silent Films. By Imogen Sara Smith.
Criterion, December 17, 2018.
For years,
John M. Stahl’s name was mainly associated with the fact that Douglas Sirk
remade three of his movies — Imitation of Life (1934), Magnificent Obsession
(1935) and When Tomorrow Comes (1939). Ironically, his other, more personal
claim to fame was the Technicolor marvel Leave Her to Heaven (1945), his most
‘Sirkian’ film.
This year’s
Cinema Ritrovato festival took a step towards redeeming Stahl as a great
director in his own right, with a retrospective program dedicated to his work.
This article will briefly look at the films shown in Bologna, but the core of
this text will address a statement by film historian Imogen Sara Smith — who
introduced some of the Stahl films at the festival —, describing John M.
Stahl’s style as “self-effacing”. Turning to the works of David Bordwell and
Barry Salt, I will argue that Stahl’s directorial style is not so much
self-effacing, as it is part of a different, more European tradition of movie
making. Even though Stahl never worked in the European film industry, this
different approach did influence American directors. It relied less on editing
and more on longer shots, fixed camera positions and a different way of using
movement and framing. I will position John M. Stahl as a director who on the
one hand was very much in tune with the changes that shaped Hollywood cinema in
the transition from the 1930s to 40s and thus deeply entrenched in the
Hollywood studio system, while on the other hand adhering longer to the
‘European’ style than most of his contemporaries and therefore is perceived as
having a less expressive mode of direction.
John
Malcolm Stahl
Jacob
Morris Strelitsky was born in Baku (current Azerbaijan) and immigrated with his
family to the United States in the early years of the twentieth century. Jacob
started working in the thriving new film industry and directed his first
(short) feature in 1914. He took on the ‘nom de plume’ John M. Stahl and
started working voor Louis B. Mayer. Stahl was one of the founding members of
the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts & Sciences in the late twenties and
moved to Universal after a short-lived attempt at running the independent
studio Tiffany Pictures.
While he
had some successes during the silent period — notably Suspicious Wives (1921)
and Why Men Leave Home (1924) — it wasn’t until the advent of the talkies that
he became a truly successful director and settled into the genre of the
melodrama that he would be associated with the rest of his career. A string of
well-received films between 1932 and 1939 (with the notable exception of
Parnell (1937), which lost a lot of money for MGM) also saw a best picture
Oscar nomination for 1934’s Imitation of Life. Adapting to the changing
landscape of cinematic storytelling in 1940s Hollywood, Stahl also directed two
complex war dramas that used the flashback structure for maximum dramatic effect.
The popular film noir genre offered him his biggest success with Leave her to
Heaven (1945). After 1945 Stahl’s career would never reach the same heights
again and he died in 1950, aged only 54.
Stahl had
the bad luck of not being rediscovered by the critics of Cahiers du cinéma as
an auteur, nor being acknowledged by their American counterparts. That might be
because most of Stahl’s silent output has been lost. Availability was an
important factor in the formation of the critical canon, as David Bordwell
states in The Rhapsodes: How 1940’s Critics Changed American Film Culture
(2016), in other words, as Bertrand Tavernier explains in his thesaurus 50 ans
de cinéma américain (1991): the fact that Stahl was already dead by the time
French critics became really interested in American cinema was part of the
reason why he was never picked up. Only Leave her to Heaven gained a lasting
reputation and when Douglas Sirk remade Magnificent Obsession (in 1954), When
Tomorrow Comes — which became Interlude in 1957 — and Imitation of Life (in
1959), Stahl’s only lasting claim to fame became the fact that Sirk had great
success with the remakes of these movies. In the decades that followed, popular
movie history forgot the originals and only the Sirk versions remained in the
collective memory.
Il Cinema
Ritrovato
As the
starting point for this article was the 2018 retrospective of John M. Stahl’s
work at Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato, I will take a quick look at the films shown
there and point out some salient facts that I will return to in my analysis
below (I will list the films in the program chronologically, regardless of the
order in which they were shown and presented at the festival).
The Woman
Under Oath (1919) is one of Stahl’s few remaining silents and already mixes
social subtext with the presence of a strong female lead. The story criticizes
class differences (a rich entrepreneur preys on the poor, which leads to
murder) and is centered around the first woman to be elected on the jury of a
New York murder trial (a fact that in reality only came to pass as late as
1937). Florence Reed delivers a fine lead performance and is the first in a
long line of strong female characters in Stahl’s films, even though in the end,
she still needs to be rescued by her male colleagues. I’d like to touch upon
two things here, which I will return to later: first, The Woman Under Oath has
a remarkably static camera. On the one hand this adheres to a late teens trend
in American cinema that steered away from the elaborate camera movements that
Hollywood introduced in the wake of Giovanni Pastroni’s Cabiria (1914) — the
diagonal tracking shot was even named ‘the Cabiria movement’ — and linked
movement more closely to editing. On the other hand, Stahl is clearly
positioned on the extreme end of this tendency, as the film contains — as far
as I counted — only one instant of actual camera movement. Secondly, The Woman
Under Oath offers an ingenious flashback-structure that uses some poignant
story telling techniques that would only be fully developed during the 1940s.
Seed
(1931), one of Stahl’s masterpieces, is the movie that forms the basis of this
article’s argument. “Stahl’s direction is self-effacing to the point of
invisibility”, Imogen Sara Smith stated in Ritrovato’s 2018 catalogue, a statement
she repeated when she introduced the film at the screening in Bologna’s Cinema
Jolly. I will argue that while Stahl was quick to adapt to the emerging rules
of the continuity cinema of the sound age, he also resorted less to editing and
favored a long take style that relied more on composition and fewer cuts. This
‘slower’ approach definitely comes off as simpler and maybe a little outdated
(as this approach mostly used in European films was by then only picked up
sporadically by American directors) but Stahl put it to such great and subtle
use that describing his style as self-effacing hardly does him justice. As I
will demonstrate, Stahl’s mastery of the continuity style hides the fact that
he has a rather idiosyncratic approach to it, which, while being very subdued,
does in fact endow his films with a very personal stylistic approach. This
gripping melodrama about two women — one a housewife, the other a powerful
business woman — whose lives are both centered around their love for the same
man, offers a plethora of scenes and images in which the power of Stahl’s
directorial style is on full display. A more in-depth look at a scene from Seed
will be part of my arguments below.
The same
observations apply to Imitation of Life, one of the director’s most famous
films, even though most viewers would associate the title with the 1959 version
by Douglas Sirk. Less lyrical than the remake, this 1934 version showcases its
directors mature style and manages to distill its emotional power from Stahl’s
mastery of seemingly simple moments that obscure (too much) how delicately they
are actually crafted.
When
Tomorrow Comes is the only Stahl movie that Sirk remade that has a bigger
reputation than its fifties counterpart, the disappointing Interlude. Inserting
some clear social commentary and the real-live event of a 1938 storm in the New
York area, When Tomorrow Comes offers one of Stahl’s most moving love stories
and exemplifies both his feeling for changing trends — the bulk of the story is
set during the course of a single night — and his remarkably consistent style.
Stahl’s
wartime propaganda effort took the shape of the Henry Fonda vehicle Immortal
Sergeant (1943), a movie that testifies to Stahl’s ability to adapt quickly to
the changes in 1940s Hollywood. Weaving a pattern of intricate flashbacks and
focusing on the group dynamics within a platoon lost in the African desert,
Immortal Sergeant employs to full effect some of the new story devices
Hollywood started using in the early 1940s. (He did the same with his second
wartime movie, 1944’s The Eve of St. Mark). While the film thematically stays
well within the limits of jingoistic gung-ho heroism (only the war will make a
man out of you), the romantic flashbacks are well structured and — surprisingly
— the combat scenes are among the best moments in the movie.
One of
oddest entries in the Bologna program (and in John M. Stahl’s career) was Holy
Matrimony (1943), a delightful, albeit forgettable little comedy about a
reclusive (fictitious) English post-impressionistic painter who assumes the
identity of his deceased butler (played by the eternally funny Eric Blore). If
ever Stahl’s direction were to be called invisible, this would be a prime
example to prove the point, as e.g. the rather pedestrian mise-en-scène of the
concluding courtroom scenes illustrate. Holy Matrimony is snappy and above all
well acted, but it seems to lack the full power of Stahl’s usual brand of
visual storytelling.
The last
film in the series was Leave her To Heaven (of which a vintage 35 mm
Technicolor print was screened), arguably Stahl’s last important film and
without a doubt his most famous. Of all the films in the program, this is the
one in which the director comes closest to being completely in tune with the
then reigning studio style. The long flashback-structure, with the flashback
bookended at either side by a frame story, is perfectly attuned to the growing
use of the device in 1940s cinema and Stahl executes it in a purely filmic way,
by changing the color scheme to evoke the changing mood and the passage of time
within the narrated story. Leave her to Heaven is a prime example of the way
Hollywood incorporated the ‘mild modernism’ of mainstream literature into its
storytelling devices.
A Valiant Studio Soldier
“Without
metaphor he conjures mood; without symbol he suggests a world.”
With those
words, film critic Richard Brody’s appraisal of Stahl touches upon one of the
important features of the director’s style: the fact that his direction avoids
drawing attention to itself to such a degree as to be called ‘invisible’ or as
Smith puts it ‘self-effacing’.
Part of
this perceived invisibility is due to the fact that John M. Stahl was a director
that subscribed completely to the emerging and ripening ‘continuity style’ of
1920s/1930s and 1940s Hollywood. Below I will look at a prime example of this
tendency in Stahl’s films, while the last chapter of this article will
juxtapose these findings with a more idiosyncratic approach, that — in my
opinion — clearly sets John M. Stahl apart from most of his contemporaries and
does indeed endow him with a signature style, that may not draw attention to
itself, but is still on full display in the majority of the movies he directed.
The Woman
Under Oath offers some interesting material in order to position the director
within the Hollywood studio system. As pointed out above, it is a film that
fits within an emerging trend in American cinema at the time (a greater
emphasis on editing) and impeccably adheres to the maturing continuity style
championed by the American directors. Simultaneously, the movie displays an
innovative approach to the flashback device, foreshadowing developments that
would only come to full fruition two decades later.
It is
beyond the scope of this text to look at the full development of the so-called
continuity style, so I’ll limit myself to a few pointers. From the 1910s
onwards, Hollywood directors started mastering a narrative style that
emphasized a fluent way of visual storytelling that was geared towards an
optimal absorption of the audience within the psychological reality of the
diegesis. Camera movement and positioning, cinematography and editing all
served the same common goal to capture the audience in the illusionary reality
of the movie and to disturb this ‘bonding’ as little as possible (when more
expressive camera movement found its way back into American cinema in the late
1920s during a short period that is referred to as the ‘rotambulating’ trend,
the famous director Rouben Mamoulian had to defend himself in a meeting of the
ASC (American Society of Cinematographers) for his use of outrageous camera
movements that — according to those attending — destroyed the strong link with
the audience by drawing too much attention to the filmic device itself).
Quoting David Bordwell in The Rhapsodes: “a style that respected both the
medium and the way people lived”, or put differently: a movie language that
told — and still tells one might add — stories in a naturalistic way and used
the elements of the medium to tell these stories as smoothly and fluently as
possible.
As I
already pointed out, Stahl (here still a novice filmmaker with only a few years
of experience) is clearly adapting to the (unwritten) rules of the emerging
continuity style and incorporating the rules of editing that go with it (see my
earlier remark about the very static camera in The Woman Under Oath). The young
director proves very apt at a flawless use of rather complex cuts, as
demonstrated by the heated discussion scene in the jury room, that frantically
cuts between the different jurors as they state their opinions.
Even more
remarkable, is the fact that Stahl and (the uncredited) writer(s) present the
courtroom drama through an ingenious series of flashbacks that are really quite
ambitious. In his most recent book, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers
Changed Movie Storytelling (2017), David Bordwell explores the significant
changes that 1940s filmmakers introduced. Among others, he singles out the
flashback as one of the main story telling devices that evolved drastically
during the period: “The flashback is a fundamental resource of 1940s cinematic
storytelling.” This filmic device obviously had been around for a long time
(according to Barry Salt, in Film Style & Technology: History &
Analysis (3rd edition, 2009), the earliest incarnation is to be found in 1908
in the Cines film La Fiabe della Nonne) but underwent significant changes and
grew more and more complex during the 1940s, according to Bordwell. Stahl’s
Immortal Sergeant is a prime example of the maturing use of the flashback, as
is Leave Her to Heaven, which opens and closes with a framing story that
bookends the rest of the movie: one long narrated flashback.
What is so
remarkable about the flashback-scenes in The Woman Under Oath is that they
gradually reveal elements that are at first withheld from the viewer, in order
to slowly reveal what really happened the morning of the murder. In his chapter
‘What they didn’t know’, Bordwell analyses how this technique also matured and
offered more complex outings in the 1940s, but it is quite a rare instance to
be found in such an early studio outing. When we first see the events on the
fatal morning, our information is limited to the knowledge of two characters
(Florence Reed’s, through whose eyes we see the proceedings, and the boy who
stands trial). When the whole scene is replayed, Reed’s testimony suddenly not
only offers a different point of view that allows us to see the room in which
the murder took place from a different — and very revealing — angle, but also
introduces the presence of a third character and how that character ended up
there. In fact, Reed’s character can’t know all these details, but David
Bordwell points out that — different from flashbacks in literature — “a film
flashback is almost never restricted to what a character could plausibly know.”
This
‘blocking’ of information is not a common device to be found in a 1919 film.
According to the research conducted by Barry Salt, the flashback became more or
less widely used in Italy and Russia in the early 1910s and only became popular
in Hollywood cinema when David Wark Griffith somewhat awkwardly tried his hand
at it in 1912’s Man’s Genesis. In the period leading up to 1920, the use of a
flashback became very common, but usually didn’t involve any complex
storytelling (American films were still coming to terms with finding acceptable
visual motives to start and end a flashback, so confusing the audience within
the flashback was still a leap most directors weren’t willing to take). In most
cases, we witness earlier events that clarify a present situation in a clear
and unambiguous way. Salt finds one example of a more daring use late in the
period, when W.S. Van Dyke develops two different storylines within the same
flashback in The Lady of the Dugout (1918). All of this substantiates the
exceptionality of the flashback scenes in The Woman Under Oath.
I single
out the use of the flashback device here to position Stahl as a director who
was clearly starting to master the ‘tricks of his trade’ and was able to
introduce variations on, and to deviate from, well-established techniques, all
firmly entrenched within the ‘continuity style’ that was finding its definitive
shape in this period. By this account, one could look at John M. Stahl as a
‘valiant studio soldier’ without a personal signature (and thus an ‘invisible
style’).
In the last
part of this article I will argue however that the director’s way of staging
his shots was rather idiosyncratic within the American studio system and that
because this style relied on longer shots and less on editing, it made for an
approach that draws even less attention to itself, thus resulting in being labeled
‘self–effacing’.
The
Invisible Master
In this
last section, I will argue that John M. Stahl’s directorial style does set him
apart from his contemporaries and owes a lot to the European rather than the
American approach to staging. While the American studios’ style was more geared
towards editing and less to camera movement, Stahl’s shots were markedly longer
than average. By circumventing part of the editing-driven storytelling that was
closely linked to the ‘continuity style’, Stahl’s films have a different rhythm
and contain more static sequences, an element that in my opinion lead to his
style being perceived as more mundane and ‘self-effacing’. It is true that
Stahl as a director always put his filming technique to the functional use of
telling the story, but in this area he merely follows the lead of almost every
other American director working in the same period (as he did in other areas,
something I tried to demonstrate in the previous section). If this was the
benchmark to measure a director’s ‘expressiveness of style’, then almost every
studio director at the time — save a few — could be labeled as having a
‘self-effacing’ style (or as David Bordwell jokingly put it at this year’s
Antwerp Summer Film School in commenting on the Stahl retrospective in Bologna
and the question of the director’s style: “Well, if you’d take Von Sternberg as
a comparison, everybody’s style could be called self-effacing”). I will use
this last part to argue that the fact that Stahl is singled out as a
‘self-effacing’ director has actually more to do with the use of longer shots
and less editing, than with the fact that his technique is more subordinated to
telling the story.
I already
mentioned the fact that post Cabiria, American/Hollywood films drifted away
from frequent use of elaborate camera movements and the continuity style
developed with a focus on editing to emphasize movement and faster cutting.
These tendencies have been studied extensively by many scholars (Bordwell and
Salt among them, but also Jakob Nielsen and Richard Raskin) but are best summed
up by Bordwell, Staiger & Thompson in The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film
Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (1985): “By 1920, Hollywood had bound
cinematic storytelling closely to cutting” (Jakob Nielsen elaborates on this
statement in Camera Movement in Narrative Cinema: Towards a Taxonomy of
Functions (2007), claiming that there was “a gravitation towards the resources
of continuity editing before taking on the resources of camera movement”).
Barry Salt has traced the advent of this tendency back all the way to Griffith,
but the main argument is that (faster) editing was an integral part of the
developing continuity style and camera movement within a scene was often
regarded as excessive and needlessly focused the attention on the technique of
filming itself. (In the aforementioned meeting, Mamoulian even felt the need to
point out that he thought the camera had been “neglected” in Hollywood cinema
and that its role was reduced to “dispassionately record what was before it”).
This
testifies to the fact that Stahl does use less editing and one could easily see
how this could be perceived as being ‘less expressive’: static shots with
dialogue and story could be viewed as a less optimal way to use the full
arsenal available to the medium (as pointed out earlier, Hollywood’s continuity
style favored editing and (reverse angle) cutting). What this doesn’t prove is
the fact that Stahl is resorting to a style that is more European than
American.
However, if
we turn to another set of data it isn’t too difficult too see that the same
discrepancy we saw above arises when comparing European ASL to American ASL. To
cut things short: European films favor longer shots; American films favor
shorter shots (and thus faster editing).
Barry Salt
and Ben Brewster link this “European resistance to using scene dissection” to a
different way of staging, that puts a lot more emphasis on the background and
the movement within the filmic space. The move towards faster cutting in
American cinema is also fostered by the fact that American directors almost
always adhered to the ‘nine foot line’, the ideal distance to shoot characters
within the frame. The fact that European directors were more willing to put the
camera further away from the action automatically meant that there was more
room for ‘background – movement’ and this lead to a growing difference in the
approach to editing scenes. While American directors championed faster cutting,
European directors favored camera movements within the scene, which lead to the
clear discrepancy in ASL to be found in the charts mentioned above.
To
illustrate how John M. Stahl’s style more closely resembles the European
approach, I will briefly look at two scenes from movies that were part of the
Bologna program. The first one is a crucial scene from Seed.
The scene
shows the protagonist Bart (John Boles) coming home to his family, after
spending time at the luxurious apartment of his mistress, a place where he can
quietly pursue his writing ambitions. The sequence is a turning point in the
movie, as it is the key moment when Bart will decide to leave his wife and
children; it takes place on the vestibule stairs of the modest family home. The
start of the scene is nothing out of the ordinary, with Stahl using reverse
angle cuts to register the start of the conversation between Bart and his wife.
Once the situation is set, though, the camera recedes and we get a shot that
shows us Bart at the bottom of the stairs, a few of his children on the stairs
and his wife near the top. In between is the vast empty space of the grey wall
(in contrast to the richly decorated apartment we saw a few minutes before)
illuminated by a few light beams (supposedly coming from a window somewhere in
the hall). Instead of continuing the scene with juxtaposed reverse angle shots,
Stahl keeps the camera at distance and allows the bitter confrontation to be
played out this way. Near the end, he resorts back to cuts, but the bulk of the
scene is a semi-long shot that emphasizes the distance between the characters
(strengthened by the motif of the staircase, a visual trope that would become a
signature style element in the sophisticated dramas of Joseph Losey). Instead
of filming the scene in the usual series of reverse angle cuts, Stahl is
clearly opting for a very different approach that relies on composition more than
editing. The result is a static semi-long shot that obviously has a different
dynamic and could be interpreted as being just a consequence of the ‘slowing
down’ of the movie language in the early sound era (it is 1933 after all).
However, there are two arguments against this reasoning. The first one is the
fact that although movie making did have a few hiccups concerning pacing with
the advent of sound, there’s been enough research that contradicts the idea
that the development of cinematic style just came to a full stop for a few
years when sound was introduced. The second reason is, as I will argue below,
that Stahl is still using this approach later on and uses it often enough for
it to be considered a deliberate staging technique and not an element born out
of the restrictions implemented by the use of the sound equipment.
To
illustrate the fact that John M. Stahl does indeed systematically avoid using
reverse angle cuts as much as possible and instead opts for uninterrupted shots
from a distance that keep all protagonists in view, I would like to end with a
brief look at a series of conversations from Imitation of Life. They all take
place when Beatrice (Claudette Colbert) and Delilah (Louise Beavers) first
start up the pancake business that will grow into an empire. Beatrice has
several conversations with suppliers that could easily be handled as regular
dialogue scenes with the usual reverse angle cuts. Each of them however keeps
both characters in the frame from mid-distance, even when, at a certain point
near the end of the sequence, the children of the household pass through the
frame and the camera pans to pick them up briefly, before halting and allowing
the dialogue between the adults to take over again. All these conversations are
subjected to only a few cuts (to Delilah cleaning the window, to the children
entering the room etc.) as well as two dissolves in between the scenes (it is
also remarkable how Stahl uses ellipsis in the continuity without any clue for
the viewer to be aware of the passing time). There are several more instances
in Imitation of Life where this happens (as there are in Only Yesterday (1933),
When Tomorrow Comes and many others), so it is safe to claim that this is no
coincidence.
Returning
to the charts Barry Salt uses in Film Style & Technology (see above) two
conclusions can be drawn regarding ASL and the use of reverse angle shots in
early American sound cinema: the ASL was not very different from that of the
late silent era (once again contradicting the idea that the introduction of
sound drastically stopped cinema in its tracks) and when the use of sound
equipment was maturing (very quickly one might add) the use of reverse angle
cuts increased. Both of these tendencies were different for European cinema
however (with the exception of British films). By refraining from extensive use
of cuts, keeping the camera at a distance and filming conversations in one
shot, John M. Stahl adhered more to this European approach and championed a
style that was different from most of his American contemporaries. It would be
wrong to look at this approach as being dictated by the limitations of using
early sound equipment or to look at it as being less expressive (as in geared
towards strictly delivering dialogue in a functional way). In my opinion,
Stahl’s idiosyncratic staging of these scenes is exactly what sets him apart as
a visionary director who had mastered the studio’s continuity style to such a
degree that he was able to spin variations on it and enrich it with different
approaches that injected his films with a tremendous sense of visual mastery
and an eye for exquisite composition.
John M.
Stahl: The Invisible Master. By David Vanden Bossche. Photogénie, October 2,
2018.
I am very
excited to share this screening with you – The Woman Under Oath (John M Stahl,
1919) is a really special film that I was lucky enough to research last year,
and it is showing on 35mm with live music in NFT1.
Most of you
will be familiar with the work of John M Stahl – even though he is best known
for a few films that were remade by more famous directors. Douglas Sirk remade
both his The Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life, while Max Ophüls’
Letter from an Unknown Woman is based on the novella by Stefan Zwieg that seems
also to have inspired Stahl’s 1933 Only Yesterday. Perhaps Stahl’s most famous
film is 1944’s Leave Her to Heaven. If you have seen any of those titles, it
won’t surprise you to learn that Stahl is celebrated as master of melodrama who
directed films with strong, passionate heroines. If you’ve seen the last one,
you’ll be excited to learn that The Woman Under Oath pivots on a trial.
Until last
year, I had never seen any of Stahl’s silent films, which is partly because so
few of them have survived (just nine features and various fragments) and even
more so because they are very rarely screened. Stahl was born Jacob Morris
Strelitsky in Baku, Azerbaijan, but moved to New York as a youngster. Taking
the name John Malcolm Stahl, he made a series of movies in the teens and early
twenties in New York, before signing with Louis B Mayer Pictures (which later
became MGM) in Hollywood in 1924. He was a founding member of the Academy and
briefly an executive at the Tiffany studio. He went on to make 20 sound films,
however (all of which survive), including the ones mentioned above. His final
picture, made in 1949, was the musical Oh, You Beautiful Doll.
I watched a selection of Stahl silents from European archives last year, as I have played a tiny part in a project masterminded by Charles Barr and Bruce Babington, which you will hear plenty more about in 2018. There will be festival screenings, a book, and I hope, a revival of interest in all things Stahl.
Stahl’s
silents were generally melodramas, often involving misunderstandings between
husbands and wives, and suspicions of infidelity. I liked the ones I saw a
great deal, but The Woman Under Oath really made me sit up and take notice.
This is a kind of courtroom melodrama if you will. A young working-class man
called Jim (Gareth Hughes) is accused of murder, and given the third degree by
the cops. When his case comes to trial, a female novelist called Grace
(Florence Reed) is selected for jury duty – in the world of the film, she’s the
first woman in the state to sit on a criminal jury, although in fact New York
wouldn’t allow such a thing for years. There are two stories going on here –
Grace’s and Jim’s – and although the film keeps us guessing, the connection
between them is not made clear until the very end.
It’s a fantastic film, with many notable sequences (including the brutal interrogation scene), and shades of 12 Angry Men (the story of which, of course, originated much later, on TV in the 1950s). Reed and Hughes both give excellent leading performances, although the latter gives a particularly haunting portrayal of a wronged man. Reed’s career began on the stage but she appeared in movies from 1915 until the late 1930s before moving to TV. She is best remembered for playing Miss Havisham in Universal’s 1934 Great Expectations, which fails to prepare you for her striking beauty as a young woman.
Hughes is
an especially fascinating character – a Welshman who specialized in sensitive
young heroes such as Jim, both on Broadway and in silent movies. His
breakthrough role came a couple of years after The Woman Under Oath, when he
starred in the film adaptation of JM Barrie’s Sentimental Tommy. Slightly at
odds with his sweet and innocent image, Hughes, who was gay, was said to have
had a rather wild time in the 1920s, and was part of Alla Nazimova’s glamorous
circle. He returned to the stage after losing money in the Wall Street Crash
and in the 1940s he discovered a Christian calling and became a missionary in
Nevada.
May McAvoy also stars as Grace’s sister Edith – I won’t say much about her character but I beg you not to read the spoiler-heavy plot synopsis on the film’s Wikipedia page. Look out too for Mildred Cheshire who plays Jim’s unfortunate girlfriend Helen (her storyline is pure #metoo) and Scottish stage veteran David Powell as the late, unlamented Edward.
The Woman
Under Oath contains elements of melodrama and the courtroom thriller, as I have
said, but one of the reasons I most admire it is its feminist
“ripped-from-the-headlines” plot. Consider this, the film was made when
American women still didn’t have the vote and yet it chooses to tackle a rather
racy proposition. In the words of an early intertitle: “Is a woman
temperamentally fitted for service on a jury in a criminal case?” The subject
matter was considered so hot at the time, that titbits such as this were
dropped into Motion Picture News while the film was in post-production:
“Because,
it is said, of the nature of its title, early publication of which might lead
to imitation owing to the timeliness and importance of its subject, no main
title has yet been announced, but it is promised that the piece deals with a
topic of new and vital public interest hitherto unutilized either on stage or
screen.”
In the end, Stahl’s The Woman Under Oath puts the case for women having their specific knowledge, as well as sympathy, to bring to bear on a trial. The murder case cannot be solved entirely by men, their assumptions or their brute force. Not only that, but the film shows Grace debating the case late at night, in a locked room with her 11 fellow male jurors. That’s exactly the kind of compromising position that people feared women would be placed in if they were allowed to serve on criminal juries. Grace keeps a cool head, though, even when her peers attempt to browbeat her into agreement. It seems very appropriate that the film is being shown at BFI Southbank so close to International Women’s Day.
The Woman
Under Oath is a bold and brilliant film, which hinges on perceptions and
misperceptions in the way that many of the very best silent films do. It has a
satisfyingly knotty plot, with an exciting twist in the tail and it is so
clearly the work of a film director with a first-class future ahead of him. If
you’ve never seen a silent Stahl before, this is an excellent way to begin.
Silent Stahl : Woman under Oath. By Pamela Hutchinson. Silent London, January 30, 2018.
In The Good Fairy (Wyler, 1935) plain, innocent and true-of-heart Louisa “Lu” Ginglebusher (Margaret Sullavan, with a very Coen-worthy character name) sneaks into a screening of the Budapest movie palace where she works as an usherette. She witnesses a scene that captures her heart and imagination: a wronged man ordering his unfaithful wife to “GO!”. The wife pleads with him to reconsider, after all, she loves him and that must mean something despite her transgression? ”GO!” the man repeats. The woman points out that beside her love there is also their child to consider? She points at the crib where a little babe is sleeping. “GO!” the husband repeats. She pleads again, but in vain. “GO!” he echoes, his anger and hurt pride reduced to a monosyllabic growl.
The movie
audience is in tears at this Ur-scene of the melodrama of the heart and hearth,
where a woman, rightly or wrongly, is harshly punished for her lack of virtue.
I noticed there were a lot of fallen women/unfaithful women/ women falling for
the wrong man in Il Cinema Ritrovato’s pre-Code program focusing on Carl
Laemmle Junior’s early years at Universal. Some people in the Bologna audience
were outraged by many of these films’ blatant misogynist undertones and/or
old-fashioned gender politics. In The Kiss Before the Mirror almost all women
are reduced to vain seductresses (either that or they are lesbians) and the
right of the husband to defend his honor (i.e. murder an erring wife) is
defended with quivering vigor. I was mostly upset by the fact that in several
of these films dull and insufferable John Boles played the man responsible for
so much suffering and passion! At least the homme fatale should be sexier? What
follows are some thoughts on two of these (fallen) woman’s films that showed
that women and socially unsanctioned love make bitter companions.
Coeurs
Fidèles
There were
two adaptations of two important twentieth century Jewish authors on the
program, one (uncredited) from Austrian Stefan Zweig and one from American
Fannie Hurst. Zweig is obviously the more renowned of the two; an author
(novelist, journalist, playwright, and biographer) who wrote with great
sensitivity and nostalgia about a world and society in decline, ill fated
desires and thwarted dreams. Fannie Hurst, whose popular and sentimental
storytelling was famously mocked in a Mel Brooks song (“hope for the best,
expect the worst, you could be Tolstoy, or Fannie Hurst”), is less prestigious,
but arguably just as important when it comes to the movies (and actually, when
you think about it, she too wrote about ill fated desires and thwarted dreams
quite a lot). Her stories and novellas were turned into several successful
films, both in the silent and talkie era. Frank Borzage made more than a few
adaptations, his 1920’s weepie Humoresque was a smash hit, but Back Pay (1922)
and the Nth Commandment (1923) all scripted by Frances Marion, did respectable
business too. In the sound era it was John M. Stahl who filmed two of her
famous stories, Back Street (1933) and Imitation of Life (1934). The latter is
the Claudette Colbert version, which stands up nicely against Douglas Sirk’s
more lavish Technicolor widescreen production with Lana Turner. The sexual and
racial politics are part of the source material and are equally problematic in
both versions.
The Greeks Had a Word for Them
Back Street
(1933) is a fallen woman picture of which there were many in the pre-code era (Lea
Jacobs has written extensively about these films in her book The Wages of Sin).
Compared to other more famous fallen woman films, such as Susan Lennox, her
Fall and Rise (Leonard, 1931), The Red-Headed Woman (Conway 1932) and Baby Face
(Green 1934), which featured Garbo, Harlow and Stanwyck respectively, Back
Street is less spectacular and a more sensitive and understanding portrayal of
a loyal woman who is no gold digger but who simply falls for the wrong man.
When Walter D. Saxel (John Boles) meets Ray Schmidt (Irene Dunne), a young fun
loving girl who dresses up in silly frilly things and who laughs too eagerly –
reminding one quite a lot of Barbara Stanwyck’s Stella Dallasin King Vidor’s
1937 remake, where she is vying for the attention of… that same John Boles
again! – her fate is sealed. She is smitten as a kitten and foolishly ignores
the fact that Boles is engaged to another woman and that he insists on meeting
her in secret at the other side of the river. Yet, despite the relationship
being hush-hush, Walter seems prepared to make Ray more than just his secret
lover. He suggests she meets his mother and then they can things from there
(“if you are dating a guy for more than three months, and you haven’t met his
mother, you are NOT his girlfriend!” Chris Rock could’ve told her). They plan a
rendezvous at Eden Park but Ray misses it because she has to help her little
sister, who is “in trouble.” Perhaps the
meeting would have led to a respectable life (but who are we kidding?) but her
missed rendezvous condemns her to a different fate. When she meets Walter five
years later in New York City Ray becomes his mistress, his shadow wife for more
than thirty years and misses out on a life of comfort, on a family, and
respectability. At the end of the film, when Dunne’s character is dying, she
bitterly remembers that missed appointment.
Back Street
is a discomforting picture, really, as there are but few moments of happiness
for Dunne, who is no gold digger and thus does not at least enjoy a life of
luxury and indulgence, as the other fallen women mentioned above did. This
tristesse is heightened by the fact that in the “romantic” scenes between Boles
and Dunne there is no sense of actual love or tenderness between them (he nags
while she tries to be a good sport and their body language is on the whole
rather cold). Despite the fact that the shadow marriage lasts for almost three
decades the lovers do not change their awkward courtesy towards each other and
there is no evidence of a passion or affection brimming under the surface that
would warrant Dunne’s coeur fidèle. Stahl’s mise-en-scène is mostly austere and
affectively restrained, and there is a still life quality to many of the
carefully framed compositions of Ray in her domestic cage. There is at least
one brilliant still life shot of Ray sitting on a sofa next to a bowl of fruit,
slowly realizing that -like the fruit- her life is slowly rotting away.
And Boles
really behaves like a cad. He has it all: the upper middle class wife, socially
climbing children, a big career and a devoted mistress, while she is eradicated
the moment her man dies (Ray dies just days after Walter, reduced to utter
purposelessness.) What makes the film even more discomforting for modern
audiences is that even though John Boles is despicable (the kind of character
you would like to throw a hiss at, or better, the heavy festival catalog) we
find out in one of the film’s final scenes that his love and devotion for Ray
is sincere! For all intents and purposes he has been “faithful” to his mistress
and true love, and he fiercely defends her before his son who obviously
despises her. On his deathbed, a traditional Victorian emotional climax, a site
for moral purging and a Hurst favorite, his thoughts are with her, showing
ultimate proof of his love for Ray. Perhaps it was exactly this ending that
made the whole story such a dire and depressing affair: he does not deserve our
sympathy but the movie insists he does. (But anyway, she should’ve told him to
“GO!” years before.)
Only
Yesterday (1933) is officially an adaptation of Frederick Lewis Allen’s
non-fiction Only Yesterday (with no plot and no fixed characters) but its
shadow source is clearly Stefan Zweig’s famous 1922 Briefe einer Unbekannten or
Letter from an Unknown Woman, which was filmed by Max Ophüls in 1948 with Joan
Fontaine, as the plot resembles Zweig’s novella on key points. Dave Kehr notes
in the festival catalog that Universal bought the rights to the Zweig property
just two weeks before the film’s release and the studio was baffled to learn
that RKO had already taken an option on the English translation that had
appeared in 1932. The studio made no reference to the Zweig novella in its
publicity however. Only Yesterday is not set in turn-of-the-century Vienna, but
opens on October 24, 1929 in New York, and so the themes and setting (changing
sexual mores, woman’s emancipation and suffrage, the financial crisis, business
ethics, changing demographics etc.) are borrowed from Allen’s book.
In Only
Yesterday we encounter James Stanton Emerson (John Boles), who is contemplating
suicide after he has lost all on the stock market. As he is taking out his
revolver – in a very unambiguous representation of a touchy subject – he
happens upon a mysterious letter that has been delivered for him personally.
(In both film versions the letter’s addressee is on the brink of death – in
Only Yesterday James Emerson is contemplating suicide; in the Ophüls film, a
duel at dawn that Stefan Brand is bound to loose was added as a frame story by
screenwriter Howard Koch.) The letter is from Mary Lane (Margaret Sullavan) who
has written:
“My Dear,
Does the name Mary Lane mean anything to you? And have you forgotten completely
a night in Virginia before the war? To me it seems only yesterday…”
We receive
this information not via a voice-over of the letter’s writer but instead we
have to read these lines ourselves straight from the handwritten letter
presented in close up. After the close up of the letter we plunge into the
past. In Ophüls’ later adaptation of Zweig’s book a close up of the letter’s
dramatic opening sentence (underscored by a powerful musical cadence) is
followed by a close up of Stefan Brand (Louis Jordan) halting his routine
grooming activities and concentrating fully on Lisa’s (Joan Fontaine) letter.
From a wider frame there is a dolly in, a dissolve, and then the images of the
past are paired with Fontaine’s voice-over repeating the opening lines of the
letter “By the time you read this letter, I may be dead.” Sarah Kozloff’s
important research (Invisible Storytellers) tells us that the voice-over (long
burdened by accusations of being too literary, redundant, or a sign of a
director’s visual deficiency) only became a widespread grudgingly accepted and
conventional storytelling technique from the late thirties onwards (an
influential trendsetter was Ford’s How Green Was My Valley from 1941 but even
then Zanuck complained about “that voice”) and even though voice-overs were
used in flashback structures (such as in the 1933 The Power and the Glory),
they seemed to have turned up sparsely in the first half of the decade. In
combination with flashbacks – where a perspective, a point of view from the
past is imagined or recounted by a character – the voice-over accentuates that
someone, a “narrator” whom we may or may not have seen before as a character,
narrates the images we see on screen. By 1948 it was quite conventional to do
things the way Ophüls did (the combination of letter-writing or reading
onscreen, a voice-over and a dissolve or cut to the past) but perhaps this was
not so in the early thirties.
There was
actually another interesting use of the combination of a flashback with
voice-over in James Whale’s 1935 The Kiss Before the Mirror: after a couple of
minutes of dry narration, we are briefly shown what the narrating character is
telling us with his voice over the images before returning to the scene of
narrating. The voice-over is not used as a narrative encadrement or frame (as
in for example the The Power and the Glory) but serves to briefly tether the
images to a particular narrator or perspective during a longish stretch of
narration. (A later scene in the same film features a Hitchcockian Rebecca-moment
when there is camera movement on the empty spaces where characters stood and
talked in front of a mirror in the past ending in something of a re-enactment
of that recalled scene.) Surely, the flashback was a convention familiar to
cinema from the silent days on (as Maureen Turim in her book and David Bordwell
on his blog have argued before), but in the early sound era the use of a
voice-over when a text (letter or diary entry) is being read, was apparently no
given, as the Only Yesterday letter/flashback suggests.
If you’ve
seen Letter from an Unknown Woman, the plot of Only Yesterday is familiar
(although there are differences in the films’ conclusions): Mary Lane
(Sullavan) meets James Stanton Emerson (Boles), on whom she has had a girlish
crush for two years, at a ball. They have a talk and some laughs and next thing
you know they emerge from a thicket and Boles is tying up Sullavan’s dress with
pre-Code relish. The lovers part but promise to see each other again. Of course
fate intervenes and Boles’ regiment has to leave for war in Europe (without
leaving a note for Sullavan). Nine months later Sullavan gives birth to their
son in New York, where she has been living with her delightful Suffragette aunt
(Billie Burke). Aunt Julia is modern, open-minded and something of a cougar
(she enjoys a frisky romance – screwball comedy style – with a toy boy.) When
Sullavan tries to meet Boles after the war at a military victory parade she is
stunned to find he does not recognize her. (In order to reach him she had to
fight her way – Reneé Adorée-in-The Big Parade-style – through a mass of
onlookers walking in the opposite direction.) She raises her child by herself
and years pass. Then, ten years later, on New Year’s Eve 1928, she meets her
love again by chance. Boles (who has a loveless, “open” marriage) finds himself
attracted to her anew, but still does not remember her! The “romance” is
repeated at his bachelor pad in the city and afterwards they part ways again
(Sullavan is too proud tell where he’s seen her before). When Boles receives
the letter ten months later, Sullavan is dying of heart failure (of course!).
He rushes to her house, too late to recognize Sullavan’s love on her deathbed,
but in time to connect with the son he never knew he had (and who is most
welcome, as his official marriage has remained childless). The son is dressed
in a military uniform (he goes to a military-style prep school) and this image
of father and son ironically and bitterly promises that the boy will become
like daddy (a military man and a “hunter”) and that history will probably
repeat itself.
Charles
Barr has aptly pinpointed (in his notes on the film) how the figuration of the
letter from a forgotten woman is the perfect emblem for what is today (with the
financial crisis of 2007 just “behind” us) one of the films most devastating
resonances: “What is the lesson of the 1929 Crash and of all the crashes that
have succeeded it? Financers forget, in their pursuit of profits – forget sound
principles, and forget, repeatedly, the lessons of what happened before.” So
Boles’ character forgetfulness is rather apt, as was the fact that this
difficult to find film, like its bitter ironies, was also almost forgotten.
Have We Met before?
So, what
will we remember from these two woman’s pictures? (Apart from the fact that
John Boles is obviously the wrong man to date?) We have learned that Universal
in the early thirties was good for much more than the well-known (and quite
wonderful) horror films that dominate its reputation today. The moral
melodramas (or fallen woman pictures), the romantic comedies (Whale’s 1935
Remember Last Night, an over-the-top Thin Man-esque detective comedy with more
martinis than Nick or Nora could’ve stomached), and the domestic dramas
(Wyler’s 1931 A House Divided) were quite up to standard as well, as were the
back stage musical and gangster films (Fejos’ 1929 Broadway, and Cahn’s 1933
Laughter in Hell) and they deserve to be more easily available. It seems that
Carl Laemmle Jr. who was famously kicked out of his own studio in 1936 actually
left behind a respectable legacy for the short time he was there. Dave Kehr’s
program notes rightfully describe Junior as a “sophisticated, ambitious and
risk-taking” producer and it seems fit that he showboated his way out of
Hollywood with a financial disaster to his name.
We’ll also
remember that structural gender stereotyping and gender inequality bordering on
outright misogyny were at the core of several scripts (okay, maybe no surprise
there) despite Only Yesterday’s Aunt Julia’s assurance that “today a woman can
face life as honestly as any man can.” Being the exception in an old-fashioned
and bigoted society, Aunt Julia’s story arc is exceptional and characters like
her would soon be ousted by the Code.
Women did
not fare better in later Universal pictures. Hitchcock’s 1964 Marnie was also
on the program (another Universal film and promoted as “a suspenseful sex
mystery”) and features one particular cringe-worthy scene where Sean Connery’s
brutish Rutland points out to Tippi Hedren that most wives follow their
husbands to the door on their way to work and sometimes manage “a little wave.”
(Okay, it’s actually funny too.) The notion that a woman’s only life
fulfillment is still a man really hurts the eyes when it’s in Technicolor, but
then again there is that great crane shot (revisiting the one from Notorious),
the amusing horse symbolism (“The best thing for the inside of a man or a woman
is the outside of a horse” Rutland muses; and a horse is the one thing Marnie
will tolerate between her legs), and the very quotable tongue-in-cheek “You
Freud, Me Jane.” So it’s hard to be offended for too long.
When cinema
is this good, all else can be forgotten really.
Unknown Women: Pre-Code Naughtiness and Exquisite Melodrama in John Stahl’s Back Street (1932) and Only Yesterday (1933) . By Anke Brouwers. Photogénie, July 10, 2016
“The subtle beauty of John M. Stahl’s early ’30s work is revealed by the exquisite 35mm prints screening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the series Universal Pictures: Restorations and Rediscoveries, 1928-1936, which runs through Wednesday, June 15. The print of Back Street, in particular, has a glistening, pearlescent clarity. Stahl was one of Universal’s prestige directors during the period covered by the series (programmed by adjunct curator Dave Kehr), when Carl Laemmle Jr., son of the studio’s founder, sought to raise the artistic level of filmmaking at Universal to compete with the major studios. The three rarely screened Stahl films form a set of variations on a theme, female devotion and self-sacrifice. They treat this theme with unusual nuance and ambivalence, both accepting the great loves – whether maternal or romantic – to which the women give their lives, and looking with a cool and even cynical eye at how little they get in return.”
* * *
“I just
bumped into my past,” a woman remarks in the opening scene of Seed. One of the
staples of melodrama is the certainty that a woman’s past will bump into her
sooner or later. Seed (1931), Back Street (1932), and Only Yesterday (1933),
three of John M. Stahl’s early melodramas, all pivot on a chance meeting
between a successful, independent career woman and a man she once loved and
can’t forget. In all three films, the man is played by John Boles, who
demonstrates how a mediocre actor can sometimes be perfectly cast. Boles was a
matinee-idol type with a bland, mannequin-like handsomeness – his profile,
smooth features, and pencil mustache all seem to have been drawn with a ruler.
He is a lifeless presence on screen, with eyes so deep-set and inexpressive
that he almost appears to be blind. The men he plays in these films are not
villains, at worst they are cads, but they are patterns of male selfishness and
entitlement, incapable of comprehending the far more complex and passionate
inner lives of the women who make sacrifices for them. This is often the
bargain of the woman’s picture: the plot may dwell on female suffering and
martyrdom, but there is a kind of revenge inherent in the rich, detailed
attention to women’s experience and the contrasting reduction of men to flat
ciphers.
Stahl is
known as a woman’s-picture specialist, but remains underappreciated in part
because many of his early films are hard to see, and also because his
reputation has been obscured by several ironies. His most widely seen film, the
stunning Technicolor noir Leave Her to Heaven (1945), is uncharacteristic of
his style at its best. Like its heroine, a flawlessly beautiful sociopath, that
film presents an unsettling mismatch between its lusciously pretty surface and
its cruel story.1 Three of Stahl’s films (Magnificent Obsession, Imitation of
Life, When Tomorrow Comes) were remade by Douglas Sirk in the 1950s, and those
versions are much better known. While it is perhaps unfair for Stahl’s name to
be forever linked to Sirk’s, comparing their styles is hard to resist. Sirk’s
baroquely stylized melodramas, hugely popular but often dismissed in their time
as sudsy kitsch, have come to be embraced for their formalist rigor and
undertones of unease, their deliberate theatricality and obliquely critical
stance. Stahl, on the other hand, approached his early melodramas with
restraint and sincerity. The sense of unforced sympathy for his characters, and
the powerfully honest performances by the central actresses, are all the more
remarkable given Stahl’s reputation as a harsh and temperamental director with
whom actors did not enjoy working.2 Even when directing a contrived and
over-the-top script such as Magnificent Obsession (1935), Stahl had a way of
defusing bombast with straightforward simplicity, a way of finding the natural
and nuanced emotions within ludicrous plot twists. There is little in the way
of showy angles or camera moves to distract from the story, but these are
handsome films, with moments of sudden loveliness.
This subtle
beauty is revealed by the exquisite 35mm prints screening at the Museum of
Modern Art in the series Universal Pictures: Restorations and Rediscoveries,
1928-1936. The print of Back Street, in particular, has a glistening,
pearlescent clarity. Stahl was one of Universal’s prestige directors during the
period covered by the series (programmed by adjunct curator Dave Kehr), when
Carl Laemmle Jr., son of the studio’s founder, sought to raise the artistic
level of filmmaking at Universal to compete with the major studios. The three
rarely screened Stahl films form a set of variations on a theme, female
devotion and self-sacrifice. They treat this theme with unusual nuance and
ambivalence, both accepting the great loves – whether maternal or romantic – to
which the women give their lives, and looking with a cool and even cynical eye
at how little they get in return.
Seed
Stahl was
one of the highest-paid directors at Universal in the early 1930s and had
considerable control over his projects; he had producer credits on most of
them, as he had at MGM during the 1920s. Many were based on literary
best-sellers, tomes that appear under the credits in a typical gesture toward
intellectual respectability.
Seed, based
on a novel by Charles G. Norris, immediately sets up a contrast between two
types of womanhood, one represented by a chic, single female executive and the
other by an old-fashioned housewife and mother. At first, our sympathy and the
film’s are with Mildred (Genevieve Tobin), the manager of a publishing house’s
Paris branch, who on a visit to the New York office stumbles on Bart Carter
(Boles), her “first, last and only” love. She lost him five years earlier, she
explains wryly, to “a brown-eyed homebody, the clinging-vine type.” Mildred is
smart in every sense of the word, a porcelain blonde with an elegant wardrobe,
a high-toned mid-Atlantic accent, and a dry-martini wit. She recalls Bart as an
aspiring writer; now he is the father of five unruly children, toiling as a
clerk to support a financially and emotionally draining family. His wife, Peggy
(Lois Wilson), seems smug in her domesticity, living solely for her domineering
brood. The kids (the youngest played by dark-eyed Dickie Moore, a prolific
child actor who would later appear as Mitchum’s deaf-mute sidekick in Out of
Past [1947]) have a habit of speaking all at once, their voices blending into a
shrill cacophony.
“Don’t you
think your maternal instinct is a trifle overdeveloped, Peggy?” Mildred quips,
earning a sure laugh. She proves there is a quicker way to a man’s heart than
giving him meals and too many offspring: she convinces her publishing house to
pay Bart a salary to finish his novel, and invites him to write in her glamorous
art deco duplex apartment. (“It’s a writer’s dream of heaven!” he cries, to
which I said amen.) She lavishes him with praise and confidence, while his home
offers only noisy tykes who distract and interrupt, and a wife who shoos him
out of her bed, saying they don’t want six kids, do they? You can hardly blame
him for his shifting loyalty.
But then
something interesting happens to the audience’s loyalty. Stahl begins to devote
long, long close-ups to Peggy: the camera simply holds motionless on her face
as she starts to cry after her sulky, exasperated husband makes a mean crack
about the kids. It remains patiently fixed on her as she breaks down in tears
of despair, her car stranded in the rain as she tries to set off across the
country. Meanwhile Bart, far from showing any concern when he learns his wife
has left him and taken the children, goes straight to Mildred’s for the night.
Of course he plans to “make some arrangement” for the family after he decamps
to Paris with Mildred. But when the movie jumps ahead ten years, we learn that
Peggy hasn’t taken a cent from Bart; she has raised the kids on her own by
opening a dress shop. And the passel of brats has grown into a passel of
likeable, attractive young men and women – the one girl is now played by Bette
Davis, in only her second film role. Davis later dismissed this as a
blink-and-you’ll-miss-it part, but in fact she’s on the screen quite a bit and
is lovely, natural and engaging.
Lois
Wilson, who plays Peggy, has a face as ordinary as her name, and her plain
acting contrasts with Tobin’s more mannered, soigné style. Peggy reveals
herself slowly, first earning pity, then sympathy, then admiration. The long,
quietly forceful close-ups of her continue, for instance as she watches Bart
hugging their daughter, whom he hasn’t seen in ten years. He has returned a
famous, rich, and glamorous author (though his literary genius is never for a
moment convincing). The children are excited and proud, harboring not the
slightest grudge against the father who abandoned them, and Peggy must watch
him swoop into their lives with expensive presents and plans for them. There is
a striking shot of her watching through the shop window as they cluster around
his car, and an even more exquisite one of her looking from an upstairs window,
lace curtains shimmering in the darkness, as they return from an evening out
with him. Framed in her separation, she looks desolate yet resigned. She has
one big angry outburst, telling Bart he can’t take the children away from her,
but in the end of course she lets them go, to benefit from the chances he can
give them. And he remains as obtuse, as insensitive as ever, fulsomely
declaring, “I think you’re the most wonderful woman in the world!” It’s the
final slap in the face, and she takes it that way, absorbing the full bitter
measure of how men sentimentalize female self-sacrifice even as they take
advantage of it. The long scene in which she says goodbye to the children is
all the more heartbreaking for being unadorned and pedestrian; it is followed
by an even longer wordless scene of Peggy alone, eating the cinnamon buns her
kids have left – which should be where the movie ends, rather than with a
dispiriting coda in which Mildred returns to say that Peggy has “won” and that
she wishes the children were hers. This speech feels tacked on and inauthentic,
though the movie ends with an image of sisterhood, as the two bond rather
gloomily over cinnamon buns and a tacit understanding that both have lost; only
a man like Bart gets to have it all.
Back Street
“You feel
like he’s not doing anything, but then you find you’re crying,” a friend said
of Stahl’s subtle direction after we watched Seed. Back Street, however, is
visually richer and more lushly cinematic from the start, as the camera circles
fluidly through a turn-of-the-century beer garden. The period setting – a
German-American neighborhood in Cincinnati – is elaborate and atmospheric, the
camera sidling through railway station crowds, weaving through dancers in
ruffles and bustles, gliding past bicycle shops and horse-drawn carriages.
Shopgirl Ray Schmidt (Irene Dunne) is a lively flirt who is looked at askance
because she goes out drinking and dancing with traveling salesmen, but who is
really a strong-minded, self-respecting woman. There is a hint of danger,
though, when she says of love, “It’s all the way or zero with me.” She meets
and falls for Walter Saxel (Boles), who woos her ardently even though he’s
engaged to another woman, apparently because his mother favors the match. They
makes plans for Ray to meet this mother at a concert in the park and win her
over, but she’s delayed (her half-sister chooses this moment to reveal that
she’s pregnant). When Ray gets to the park, there is a beautifully
choreographed sequence as she fights her way through the departing crowd; then
the camera slowly pulls back and back to reveal her alone in front of the empty
bandstand, her big chance spoiled.
Dramatic images such as this appear like milestones throughout the story. After Ray bumps into Walter on the streets of New York five years later, a car’s headlamps catch them like a spotlight as they kiss in the falling snow. Ray is a well-paid career woman, but we see Walter leading her into an apartment he has rented, and in the next scene she is playing solitaire – having given up her job to accept the lot of a kept mistress. Alone while he spends the summer in Europe, she sits in her sweltering apartment painting china while the noise of jackhammers blasts through an open window. Walter, on his return, is unhappy to learn she has sold a few of her painted vases – he doesn’t like the idea, though it dawns on him that he forgot to make any “provision” for her while he was away. “I hope you weren’t inconvenienced,” he says. She tries to explain how empty and aimless her life is. (“Empty? When you have me?” he retorts, and for a second you think he must be joking, but he’s not.) She even asks him to “give her a child,” and he huffily talks about “the moral issue,” pointing out that she is after all not his wife – as though she needed to be reminded. Stahl trains his camera on Ray for an excruciatingly long take after Walter has departed, absorbing the realization of how little he understands or appreciates her feelings. She clearly recognizes how hopeless and unfair the situation is; she tells another married man’s mistress living in her building, “He’s not worth it. I wonder if any man is.” Yet when she has the chance to marry a kind, clever, and successful man who has always loved her, Ray lets Walter talk her out of it; with typical self-absorption, he talks about his needs and says, “If you wanted to make me suffer, you’ve succeeded.”
But when the film jumps ahead some twenty years, the emotional landscape has shifted, as it did in Seed. Ray is still the other woman, but the film now emphasizes how devoted Walter is to her, and that even after twenty-five years they are still in love. His children are outraged and ashamed by the open secret, and while they are portrayed as priggish and mean-spirited, Walter’s defense to his son of his right to have two lives shows yet another side of his selfishness. The film ends as a romantic tragedy, the tale of an undying love that has outlasted all obstacles, but while these scenes are well handled (Boles is even rather good after Walter has a stroke, and there is a nice moment when the remorseful son is shocked to learn his father’s mistress got only $200 a month), they cannot erase the middle section’s troubling depiction of a bright, talented woman whose life has been stunted by living for love alone. Irene Dunne, with her sharp yet sidelong intelligence, her mix of radiance and reserve, perfectly embodies the film’s ambivalence. While Boles can’t suggest the kind of passion that might perhaps justify his character’s behavior (as Charles Boyer does in the 1941 remake with Margaret Sullavan), Dunne is able to convey that true love might also be a raw deal.
Only
Yesterday
A similar
theme runs through Only Yesterday, the film in which Margaret Sullavan made her
screen debut. The plot is quite obviously taken from Stefan Zweig’s short story
Letter from an Unknown Woman, though this source is not credited, and the
setting, mood, and meaning are entirely different from the achingly beautiful
1948 adaptation by Max Ophüls, starring Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan. Ophüls
captures the dark interiority of the novella and even enriches the meaning,
creating a devastating anatomy of the illusions that lie at the heart of
romantic love. Stahl’s version is at once more optimistic and more cynical,
less about inner lives than about the public sphere of social mores and world
events.
Indeed, the
title and official credit for Only Yesterday come from Frederick Lewis Allen’s
1931 best-selling history of the 1920s. The film opens with a long and
marvelously chaotic scene at a Park Avenue cocktail party on the day of the
1929 stock market crash. Well before any of the main characters are introduced,
we see a banker shoot himself in a men’s room; women in clinging fur-trimmed
gowns prattle foolishly about whether they will have to get jobs now (“My
dear,” Franklin Pangborn assures one platinum blonde, “You were born with a
job”); and a bespectacled young socialist rants about income inequality and
economic justice. The party’s hosts, the Emersons, are a wealthy and
fashionable couple, each cheating on the other. Jim Emerson (Boles again) is a
stockbroker; cleaned out by the crash, he locks himself in his study and
prepares to blow his brains out, until he is distracted by a letter that asks
him to recall a girl he met more than ten years earlier.
The
flashbacks begin with Jim and Mary (Sullavan) meeting at a dance for soldiers
going off to the First World War. Unlike the sublime encounter in Letter, which
the lovesick heroine almost seems to will into reality, this is a depressingly
conventional scene of a soldier deflowering a naïve girl on the eve of sailing
overseas. Taking advantage of her confession that she has harbored a crush on
him, he launches into a heavy-handed string of clichés, talking about fate and
the moonlight. Mary’s baby is born at the Armistice, and there is a clever cut
from combat footage of the trenches to the aftermath of the birth, implying the
painful battle of labor. She rushes out to meet Jim in a victory parade, only to
find he doesn’t know her from Eve.
A bracing
injection of feminist principles saves the film – and Mary – from sliding into
pathos. Too proud to ask her baby’s father for support, or to stay with her
genteel Southern family, Mary comes to New York to live with her aunt and goes
to work, becoming the owner of a dress shop. Billie Burke (best known as Glinda
the Good Witch) gives a delightful and unexpected performance as Aunt Julia,
managing even with her fluting voice and fluttering mannerisms to be convincing
as a smart, funny, open-minded New Woman. Julia tells Mary that women no longer
need to be dependent, that they can face life honestly and that the double
standard is a thing of the past. An out-of-wedlock child is “just one of those
biological events. It’s not tragedy, it’s not even good melodrama.” Indeed, no
one ever seems to care that Jimmy Jr. is illegitimate. He grows into a happy,
pudgy child, and there is tremendous warmth and charm in scenes of Mary’s life
with Jimmy, Julia, and Julia’s boyfriend Bob, a sweet goofball played by
comedian Reginald Denny. They make an eccentric, loving family; they all have
plenty of money, Mary has a thriving career, and a nice if nerdy suitor who
wants to marry her. Not a bad life, one would think – how could anyone prefer
tragedy or bad melodrama to this?
Then, at a
New Year’s Eve party ten years after their original meeting, Mary bumps into
Jim again. When he picks her up, she at first thinks he’s recognized her, but
soon learns the truth. “I couldn’t have forgotten anyone as lovely as you,” he
coos in a taxicab. Mary is not shattered by the realization that the father of
her child has no idea who she is; she accepts Jim’s memory lapse with a
slightly bitter, shrugging resignation, even seeming to enjoy her private
knowledge of his shallowness when he takes her to the apartment he maintains
for trysts and goes into the same cheesy, sentimental seduction routine he used
before. And she sleeps with him again, telling him nothing. It seems we are
meant to see Mary here as a mature woman with sufficient confidence and control
to indulge her desire for a man while accepting that he will never return or
comprehend the depth of her feeling. But Jim is such a smarmy, superficial cad
that we can only feel this woman is lowering herself.
Alas, the
film does not take Aunt Julia’s words to heart; it veers into tragedy – out of
nowhere, the 30-year-old Mary develops heart failure and dies – and the ending
is not even good melodrama. While Louis Jourdan’s reaction to the letter that
reveals what he has lost conveys such gut-punching regret that his tragedy
seems almost greater than Fontaine’s, Jim’s reaction to Mary’s letter is
delight at learning that he has a son. He rushes over to tell the bereaved
Jimmy Jr. that he is his father, and a sticky scene of masculine bonding, as
father admires son’s military school medals and promises to take him hunting,
leaves a very bad taste in the mouth. Jim gets his own medal for bad conduct.
Only
Yesterday is salvaged from soupiness by good dialogue, an appealing tone of
frankness, and mostly fine acting. Sullavan was unhappy with her performance,
but with her famously plaintive, husky voice and the flinty edge within her
tiny slip of a figure, she has just the right balance of sensitivity, vulnerability,
and backbone. Arguably, Sullavan’s dry underplaying makes Mary seem a bit too
sane and spirited to let one romantic disappointment shadow her whole life.
Stahl’s blend of emotion and restraint, intimacy and tactful distance do not
lend themselves to soaring romance or three-hankie tragedy, but are perfectly
suited to a transitional moment of changing ideas about morality, romance, and
women’s roles. The heroines of these pre-Code films are caught between
Victorian expectations that they should live for men and modern suggestions
that they can live for themselves; between the past they keep bumping into and
a future they can’t quite grasp.
Women in Love: Three Early ’30s Melodramas by John M. Stahl (Seed, Back Street, Only Yesterday). By Imogen Sara Smith. Bright Lights Film Journal, May 24, 2016.
‘A lifetime for me” is what the heartbroken heroine calls one romantic evening in John M. Stahl’s 1933 film “Only Yesterday,” and we believe her. The depth of feeling in melodramas, including “women’s films,” those movies that have often addressed issues important to female audiences, found fertile ground in the cinema of the era. And it was a genre in which Stahl excelled, working in an unadorned directing style that was not due to a lack of imagination, but to a focus on human emotion so intense that it could make small moments seem as dazzling as a match struck in the darkness.
Despite
their many fine qualities, Stahl’s films have often been underrecognized in
recent decades. “Melodrama Master: John M. Stahl,” a retrospective opening
Thursday at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley,
Calif., offers an opportunity to appreciate the scope of his subtle approach to
directing. Curated by Susan Oxtoby, senior film curator at BAM/PFA, the series
includes 10 films from the 1930s and ’40s, most consisting of the intimate
human-interest stories for which he was acclaimed.
Stahl, who
died in 1950 at age 63, entered the industry during the silent era, after
performing on stage. He was highly regarded for directing such poignant stories
as the Fannie Hurst adaptation “Back Street” (1932), in which a bright-spirited
Irene Dunne plays Ray, a shop owner’s daughter who falls in love with the
already engaged Walter (John Boles). A missed opportunity for Ray to win his
family’s approval dashes their hopes of marrying. Years later Ray, a career
woman, encounters the married Walter in New York, and they begin an affair. Ray
gives up her livelihood to be kept in a modest apartment, and is often consumed
by loneliness. Stahl lets her agony unfold in patient takes without explaining
or questioning her choices, and implausible situations become credible through
Dunne’s painfully believable performance.
Stahl’s
skillful direction of actresses is also evident in the piercing “Only
Yesterday.” He cast the incandescent, husky-voiced Margaret Sullavan in her
first film role, as an openhearted young woman who spends an evening with a
handsome man (Boles) during World War I, and gives birth to his child while he
is at the front. After the war, her lover does not remember who she is; she
cannot bear to tell him, and goes into business to support her son. The film
was suggested by Frederick Lewis Allen’s chronicle of the 1920s of the same
title, but the plot is indebted to Stefan Zweig’s novella “Letter From an
Unknown Woman” (1922). A backdrop of tumultuous events—especially the
devastating opening set during the 1929 stock market crash, before most of the
story unfolds in flashback—underlines the heroine’s constancy.
Stahl’s
spare directing style is thrown into stark relief when compared with the ironic
and lushly stylized work of another master of melodrama, Douglas Sirk, whose
remakes of Stahl’s films “Imitation of Life” (1934), “Magnificent Obsession”
(1935) and “When Tomorrow Comes” (1939)—the last was retitled “Interlude” in
Sirk’s 1957 version—have tended to overshadow Stahl’s career in recent years.
But Stahl’s films were more than antecedents for Sirk’s lavish and subversive
visions.
In Stahl’s
“Magnificent Obsession,” starring an affecting Dunne, the preposterous plot—a
love story between a woman and the man who is responsible for her husband’s
death and for her blindness, with a strange supernatural twist—takes on an
uncanny quality, presented as it is without distracting surface detail but an
element of screwball comedy. He brought a delicate poetry to “When Tomorrow
Comes” (1939), in which Dunne and Charles Boyer (who were also paired in Leo
McCarey’s 1939 “Love Affair”) play a waitress and married pianist who have a
brief romance, separating soon after taking refuge in a church during a
hurricane.
Stahl
worked with a vivid palette in the haunting Technicolor noir “Leave Her to
Heaven” (1945), a story of obsession and murder set in motion when a novelist
(Cornel Wilde) meets a woman on a train (Gene Tierney) who claims he resembles
her father. Although the color is as radiant as the emotions are hyperbolic,
Stahl’s restrained direction yields a powerfully dreamlike quality—at times,
the camera seems transfixed by Tierney’s gaze. Female self-sacrifice is
replaced by selfishness, and romantic passion is distilled in the image of
Tierney’s character scattering her father’s ashes while on horseback.
Violence
pervades the domestic sphere and beyond in the more uneven period drama “The
Foxes of Harrow” (1947), set in the antebellum South and loosely based on the
1946 novel by the African-American author Frank Yerby. Stahl brought a
delightfully light touch to the deadpan comedy “Holy Matrimony” (1943), about a
fame-shy British artist who assumes the identity of his dead valet. “The Keys
of the Kingdom” (1944), the story of an adventurous Catholic priest, played by
Gregory Peck, lacks the emotional force of the director’s best work, but has
its own grace and warmth, especially in depicting friendships among clergy
members.
In his
influential book “The American Cinema” (1968), the critic Andrew Sarris
classified Stahl under “Expressive Esoterica,” a section dedicated to “unsung
directors with difficult styles or unfashionable genres or both.” Stahl’s work,
especially stellar achievements such as “Back Street” and “Only Yesterday,” is
still worthy of deeper examination and appreciation, offering as it does a
striking cinematic vision and moments of breathtaking beauty.
‘Melodrama Master: John M. Stahl’ Review : An underrecognized director’s intense focus on human emotion. By Kristin M. Jones. The Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2015
It has become a familiar refrain: the weight-bearing films of the history of cinema tend to be those that are readily available; unavailability often relegates important and original work to the catacombs of memory. While it’s enduringly important to revisit works of well-known greatness—their merits reside precisely in their complexity, in the vastness of thought that reveals itself only subtly and gradually, through multiple viewings—it’s also important to experience the shock of the new by means of the old, to discover an artistic past that is unsettled and has yet to be known. And approaching the past from a slant makes us sensitive to the shock of recent films, too, which is ultimately the point: classic works, besides providing pleasure, inform the viewing—and the creation—of audacious and original new films.
Sometimes
the near-great delineates the great in the way shadow does light, as John M.
Stahl’s surprisingly rare (and just plain surprising) film “When Tomorrow Comes”
reminds us. Though not exactly a work of genius, the movie—which is playing
tomorrow through Sunday at I.F.C. Center, as part of the series “1939:
Hollywood’s Golden Year”—is a marvel and, ultimately, a terror. If Stahl’s name
endures in the history books, he will be known as a provider of raw (or,
rather, parboiled) material for Douglas Sirk. The latter master of melodrama,
whose career was already in full swing but modest flight in the
nineteen-fifties, became a sort of directorial star with his 1954 film
“Magnificent Obsession,” which was a remake of Stahl’s 1935 film of the same
name. Sirk’s final Hollywood feature, “Imitation of Life,” from 1959, was also
a remake of a film by Stahl, this one from 1934.
The sole
film by Stahl that endures with a life of its own, so to speak, is “Leave Her
to Heaven,” from 1945. My colleague Anthony Lane wrote an appreciation of it
here a few years ago, though I confess that I find the true auteurs of the film
to be the costume designer, Kay Nelson (especially for the sunglasses), and the
Technicolor director, Natalie Kalmus. Well, “When Tomorrow Comes” also ended up
as Sirk fodder—but the remake that it inspired, “Interlude,” from 1956, one of
Sirk’s most personal and emotionally violent films, is itself as hard to get
hold of as Stahl’s original (I’ve got a VHS that I recorded off of TV in 1991).
“When
Tomorrow Comes” isn’t quite at the exalted level of Sirk’s film (few are), but
it offers distinctive excitements of its own. The story possesses a pure
melodramatic simplicity—a New York hash-house waitress meets a big-time concert
pianist who romances her but turns out to be married.
I followed
Sirk’s lead in citing it as a loose adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel
“Serenade.” Tom Ryan, writing in Senses of Cinema earlier this year, corrected
the record, showing that both Sirk’s and Stahl’s films are based on another
work by Cain, “The Root of His Evil,” later retitled “A Modern Cinderella.” I
heartily recommend Ryan’s article; it’s a terrific piece of detective work. He
outlines the significant departures of Stahl’s film (and its script, by Dwight
Taylor) from Cain’s novel while also highlighting the works’ proximity, both in
structure and in detail. Sirk, by contrast, transformed the book radically,
leaving only the barest outline and a handful of nodal points (plus a few
others borrowed from Stahl’s film).
“When
Tomorrow Comes,” which takes place in Depression-era New York, begins with an
extraordinary, even thrilling set piece that speaks sharply to its time. The
restaurant where the waitress, Helen Lawrence (played by Irene Dunne), works is
a chain. Its waitresses are unionized, and, as they dash about and serve
customers during the busy lunch hour—under the wary eye of a supervisor—they
pass the word about a union meeting that night at which they’re preparing to
call a strike. The scene features a suave tracking shot, with the waitresses
talking relatively indiscreetly despite their fear of company spies—and it’s
exactly that fear of spies that sparks Helen’s meeting with a customer, a man
with a distinctive manner and a heavy French accent, who turns out to be the
concert pianist Phillipe Chagal. (The pianist, played by Charles Boyer, comes
off as more original at spelling than at music.)
Stahl’s
scenographic inventions and camera moves aren’t the delight; neither is the
dialogue, which has little in the way of wit or rhetorical flair. The same goes
for the acting. Dunne’s perky nobility and venerable innocence are all too
smooth, and her breathless vulnerability seems calculated; for me, she’s a
cinematic buzzkill. Boyer, meanwhile, an actor capable of a quiet bleakness, is
here merely an accent with a face attached. No, in “When Tomorrow Comes,” the
world itself is the star. As studio-sanitized as the city sets may be, the
movie nonetheless strongly evokes the deep-rooted tensions of the working world
and the politics that undergird it, as in the union-meeting sequence, in which
the waitresses sing a famous song of solidarity (one soon to be heard in a
union-centered fall-season release) and keep an eye out for traitors in their
midst (a tiny twist involving a membership card is a precious and revealing
detail).
The sweaty
and teeming city streets (Helen lives on Fifty-second, east of First Avenue)
are conjured in similar detail. There are evening swims in the East River from
a nearby pier, and the streetwise local kids have abrasive encounters with the
police. But the movie runs on a lofty irony: whisked away into Philip’s
isolated world of luxury and leisure, Helen leaves behind both the harsh
practical cares that weigh down her daily life and the hearty, invigorating,
vital relationships that fill it up. Her love for Philip, with its element of
tragic impossibility, is both a redemption and a sacrifice, an exalted incarnation
of a passionate dream and a paradoxical renunciation.
That paradox is all the clearer in that Helen, a frustrated singer who put her training aside for financial reasons, recovers, in her affair with Phillipe, a side of her character that her labors, her friendships, and even her incipient relationship with a union organizer, Jim Holden (played by Onslow Stevens), kept suppressed. The movie leaves no doubt that the sanguine and bumptious world of working people is also one of unremitting struggle and bitter frustration. Her elevation to the refined world of classical music is an inner homecoming—an accession to a place where she has always, despite her circumstances, belonged. In Helen’s class-conscious, class-centered world, she instantly changes sides—but has to go home again. (Her unease comes to the fore in a deftly crafted, albeit undeveloped, moment with her roommate, who’s also a waitress.)
There are
lots of unrealized movies built into “When Tomorrow Comes.” The story of
Helen’s effort to fit into Phillipe’s way of life is one of them. Another is
the prospect of her becoming the other woman: Phillipe is married. (As we
learn, his wife suffers from mental illness, and he nobly dedicates himself to
her well-being—without, of course, depriving himself of the ancillary
pleasures.) Though neither story comes to fruition, Stahl delivers an implicit
jolt of horror in the movie’s last shot, which on its own is worth the price of
admission.
Stahl’s
direction is quietly impassioned, if uninspired. He’s at his absolute best when
sitting on his hands—when seemingly forcing himself to remain visually
reserved, even impassive, in the face of overwhelming emotion. Without
metaphor, he conjures mood; without symbol, he suggests a world; the
transparency of his enthusiasms leaves out all too much but hints at much more.
In effect, it’s a movie of limited imagination but enormous fecundity; it’s
great raw material.
John M. Stahl’s “When Tomorrow Comes”. By Richard Brody. The New Yorker, September 18, 2014
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