AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (1931)

Young Clyde Griffiths (Phillips Holmes) comes from a humble background—he grows up living in the Skid Row mission his parents run—but wants better things. We see him working as a bellhop in a Kansas City hotel, flirting with a rich girl but dating a lowly hotel maid. While out with his drunken friends, he is involved in a car crash that kills a pedestrian; he manages to run away fast enough to avoid any connection and leaves town. He eventually winds up in New York and gets a job at his uncle's shirt factory. He’s making money, but finds the work boring and beneath him. Invited to his uncle's house, he fails to make a good impression due to his sullen personlity. But at the factory, he becomes smitten with new worker Roberta Alden (Sylvia Sidney, pictured with Holmes) and though it's against the rules, the two see each other on the sly. He pressures her to have sex, and soon she is pregnant and pressing him for marriage. But he has since met the rich and lovely Sondra Finchley (Frances Dee) and, seeing a much better future with her, begins to fantasize about killing Roberta by faking a canoeing accident. One summer day, the two go out to a deserted part of a lake and he starts to act on his impulse. At the last minute, he stops himself, but the canoe tips anyway and she drowns. He rather heartlessly leaves the scene to go partying with Sondra and her moneyed crowd, but soon the police are able to draw a web of circumstantial evidence around him.

It's difficult to know how to approach this film critically. Based on a classic novel by Theodore Dreiser, directed by the stylish Josef von Sternberg, and filmed in the pre-Code era when filmmakers could deal with most of the movie’s "unsavory" themes (premarital sex, abortion, a crime of passion), there was definitely potential here for a classic movie. However, this just scratches the surface of the novel, coming off like a bland Reader's Digest condensation, and with very few of the visual flourishes one might expect from Sternberg. In the novel, Clyde's upbringing is crucial to an understanding of how his personality develops, but the movie skips over almost all of that. Holmes does manage to make the character passive, callow and unfeeling (his masculinity is questioned often enough that it made me wonder if Sternberg was suggesting some sexual orientation conflict) but we wind up with very little sympathy for him; Roberta is only lightly sketched as a character, and Sondra is barely present, so there is really no one in the story for us to identify with. Perhaps if I hadn't read the novel, my reaction would be different. The 50s film version, A PLACE IN THE SUN, is glossier with rounder characters, though still no match for the book, which admittedly gets hard to plow through in the last third. Interesting mainly as a pre-Code relic. [DVD]