Stubs - An American Tragedy

An American Tragedy (1931) Starring: Phillips Holmes, Sylvia Sidney, Frances Dee Directed by Josef von Sternberg Screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein Based on the novel An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (New York, 1925). Produced by Josef von Sternberg Runtime: 96 minutes. USA Black and White Melodrama, Romance, Pre-Code.

On July 11, 1906, Chester E. Gillette drowned Grace Brown in a lake in Herkimer County, New York. That murder was the basis of Theodore Dreiser’s 880-page novel, An American Tragedy, published in 1925. When Paramount bought the rights, the film was originally planned as the American debut of Sergei Eisenstein, the renowned Soviet film director; Battleship Potemkin (1926).

Apparently, Eisenstein was so interested in the project that he wrote, what the Associate Producer David O. Selznick called “the most moving script I have ever read." However, B.P. Schulberg, the head of Paramount, wasn’t so impressed and replaced Eisenstein with Josef von Sternberg. Eisenstein never did make a Hollywood film and returned to the Soviet Union.

The change in director didn’t change the Hays Office’s objections to the film and the aspect of the story that dealt with an abortion. Colonel Jason S. Joy, the Director of the Studio Relations Office, wrote to Schulberg on April 25, 1931, "If the references to abortion remain in "American Tragedy"...it will surely tend to eventually open the way for a more serious development of this subject in pictures." However, Schulberg wasn’t willing to eliminate Roberta's attempts to secure an abortion from the film because of an earlier approval given by Father Daniel J. Lord, a clergyman who collaborated on the draft of the Hays Code. But on July 15, 1931, Jesse Lasky wrote to Hays agreeing to eliminate the following dialogue, which refers to abortion: "You went to the druggist who testified here." "Yes sire." "Anyone else?" "Yes sire, to seven others before I could get anything at all." "But what you got didn't help, did it? "No sir."

The film, however, was still banned in England and South Africa; Italy banned the film because of the reference to abortion; and New York, Virginia and Kansas censor boards called for the deletion of the allusion to abortion during the trial.

But that was not the end of the problems with the production. Dreiser, the author of the source material, sued Paramount trying to stop its release, claiming the studio had misrepresented his book. Dreiser claimed that Paramount had transferred his novel into an "ordinary murder story," depicting Clyde Griffiths (in Dreiser's words) as a "designing, lecherous, mean and contemptuous individual." "He claims," the judge continues, "that instead of an indictment of society, the picture is a justification of society and an indictment of Clyde Griffiths." The judge ruled in favor of Paramount and denied Dreiser's motion for an injunction against Paramount releasing the film.

However, Dreiser was able to get many scenes that had been edited out of the movie. The resulting final cut was so far from what von Sternberg had intended, he disowned the picture.

A written prologue notes that the film is dedicated "to the army of men and women all over the world who have tried to make life better for youth."

The film begins with Clyde Griffiths (Phillips Holmes), the son of evangelists, working as a bell hop at the Green-Davison Hotel in Kansas City. And this provides him with his first brush with high society, which is fueled when the daughter of one of the guests tips him big because she thinks he’s handsome. However, his girlfriend, who works as a maid at the hotel, helps pop that balloon.

One night, Clyde is the passenger in a car driven by a drunk fellow employee when the car hits a little girl and kills her. Everyone flees the scene of the accident and Clyde, fearing he will be arrested, goes home to pack. His mother, Asa Griffiths (Lucille Laverne), is unable to talk him into staying and Clyde leaves town.

Following a series of odd jobs, including washing dishes, Clyde, now twenty, gets a job as a bellboy in a large Chicago hotel. He hears that his wealthy uncle, Samuel Griffiths (Frederick Burton), is a guest in the hotel.

Next, we’re told through a title card that after an apprenticeship, Clyde becomes foreman of the collar stamping department, which employs only young women, at his uncle’s shirt factory in Lycurgus, New York. As a department head, Clyde is forbidden from fraternizing with the workers. (The girls in the stamping department at the shirt collar factory are stamping the size number onto the disposable shirt collars. The style of shirt requiring a separate paper collar went out of fashion after WWII, and by 1955 there was only one factory left in the United States that still made them.)

Publicity still showing Clyde's (Phillips Holmes) interviewing Roberta "Bert" Alden (Sylvia Sidney).

But that changes when Roberta Alden (Sylvia Sidney) is hired to work for him. Ignored by his uncle's socially conscious family and longing for companionship with a woman, Clyde is quickly smitten by her.

Clyde takes Bert for a canoe ride as part of their dating.

Breaking the rules, Clyde seeks “Bert” out, trying to run into her on the street and then later in the park, where he’s rowing a boat. He tells her how much he loves her and the two have a secret love affair in the spring and summer when they are able to spend their weekends outdoors.

Things change went it gets cold and Clyde becomes interested in indoor activities.

But when winter comes, Clyde pleads with Bert to allow him to meet with her in her room and seduces her.

Meanwhile, Clyde has met Sondra Finchley (Frances Dee), a beautiful debutante, who is also attracted to him. When she asks him if he has a girl, he tells her no. She invites him to a winter ball and he goes alone to see her.

As the weeks pass, Clyde ignores Bert and falls further in love with Sondra.

When Bert discovers she is pregnant, she pleads with Clyde to marry her, but he suggests she return to her parent's farm, promising he will marry her later.

Sondra Finchley (Frances Dee) invites Clyde to a weekend party.

In the summer, Sondra invites Clyde to secretly join her at a weekend party and promises to marry him when she comes of age in October.

After reading a newspaper article about the accidental drowning of a couple, in which the man’s body wasn’t found, Clyde contemplates drowning Bert then invites her to spend a weekend in the Adirondacks, where he promises they will marry.

They eat lunch on the shore of the lake. Clyde makes up the excuse that he’d like to take some photos of her out on the lake, getting her to leave some of her belongings on the shore, as well as the tripod for the camera.

While out on a lake in a canoe, Clyde confesses that he brought Bert to the lake to drown her, but has suddenly decided to marry her. Bert, confused, stands up and shakes Clyde, and by doing so, overturns the boat. She apparently also hits the camera that Bert is holding when he goes over. As Bert screams for help, Clyde starts to save her, but then decides to swim to shore and allows her to drown.

Even though he had used aliases when checking into hotel rooms with Bert, sometime later, Clyde's room is searched by the police and love letters from Bert and Sondra Finchley are found.

Clyde senses the police are closing in on him.

Meanwhile, at Sondra's camping party, the authorities close in. Hearing gunshots, which are the posse’s signal that they’d found the camp, Clyde makes an excuse to Sondra and flees. Not far away, he is arrested and charged with Bert's murder.

Clyde and Sondra's last moments of happiness before his arrest.

Throughout a nationally publicized, lengthy trial, Clyde maintains that he is innocent. His attorneys, Belknap (Emmett Corrigan) and Jephson (Charles B. Middleton), attempt to convince the jury that Clyde's "change of heart" in the boat removes him from guilt.

During the trial, Clyde with one of his lawyers, Jephson (Charles B. Middleton).

They battle with the District Attorney, Orville Mason (Irving Pichel), who is adamant that Clyde is guilty of first-degree murder. The two sides get so intense that they almost come to blows in the courtroom before the Judge (Arnold Korff) stops them.

Mason has the boat and the other belongings brought into the courtroom and forces, over his lawyer’s objections, to reenact the events that transpired that day.

The jury is somewhat hung before the lone holdout is convinced and threatened to change his vote. Clyde is convicted of first-degree murder and is sentenced to die by the electric chair within ten days.

Clyde meets with his mother twice, once right after the sentence. She has been flown to the trial by a newspaper to act as a reporter, so she’s in the courtroom when he is sentenced.

Later, in his prison cell, his mother comes to see him again. She promises to get him a new trial and to talk to the governor for him. But she changes her mind when Clyde tells her the truth about the murder, and he admits that, although he did not kill Bert, he could have saved her but didn't because he wanted her dead.

His mother blames herself for bringing Clyde up among evil, dirty surroundings, admitting that while she and his father were trying to save the souls of others, they let Clyde go astray. After telling Clyde to face his punishment "like a man," Mrs. Griffiths tells him that someday, somewhere, he will be given the right start and embraces her son through the prison bars.

Contemporary reviews were not enthusiastic. Mordaunt Hall, writing for The New York Times, calls the film “uninspired, particularly the early chapters” though he notes that once the film reaches the jury trial, “These sequences fully atone for the disappointment in the early episodes and to a certain extent for the none too effective closing sequence.” He ultimately notes, “In his haste to get to the heart of the murder story Mr. von Sternberg has lost the real pith (“essence”) of the narrative.”

I agree with Hall’s assessment. Too much of the film is told as if skipping stones across the surface. Too much happens off-camera for the viewer to really get invested in the story. As an example, Clyde meeting his uncle at the hotel, which leads to the job in the shirt factory, is omitted and replaced with a title card explaining what had happened. Likewise, the police investigation that leads them to Clyde as a suspect comes off as a bit out of nowhere. It seems almost as a random act that the police are searching his room. I have to assume the book sets it up better.

On the other hand, a lot of time is spent showing women stamping collars, which is necessary to the story, but we get the idea that it’s rather mundane and repetitive work rather quickly.

Von Sternberg is best known for films like The Blue Angel (1930), as well as other collaborations with actress Marlene Dietrich in the decade. In fact, this film came between two films with Dietrich, Dishonored (1930) and Shanghai Express (1932). Not one of the most prolific directors in Hollywood, von Sternberg films were known for their striking pictorial compositions, dense décor, chiaroscuro illumination, and relentless camera motion. Some of those elements are present here, but the whole doesn’t work.

If, as reported, Dreiser was able to force cut scenes to be added back, you have to wonder what the film was like previously, and consider that the final film may not have been the director’s vision.

Phillips Holmes, whose career is discussed in our review of Her Man (1930), while handsome is not a great actor and certainly not strong enough to take on the third of the film that concentrates solely on him during the trial. Variety in their review of the film cites this problem, “So the entire burden is on Phillips Holmes, as the floundering victim, which he is incapable of upholding for the camera.” He is also burdened with playing a very unsympathetic character, one who repeatedly flees in the face of difficult situations. Overall, he seems to play the character without any emotion; I don’t know if that was intentional or not.

Frances Dee was near the beginning of her career at this point and, a busy actress, featured in six films released in 1931. Dee, who is very pretty here, isn’t given all that much to do as the young debutante attracted to Clyde. Her role, which Elizabeth Taylor would reprise as Angela Vickers in the 1951 remake A Place in the Sun, is much abbreviated in this film, so it’s hard to judge her acting skills based on such limited screen time.

Sylvia Sidney gives the best performance of the actors in An American Tragedy.

Sylvia Sidney, who does get more time on screen, gives the strongest performances of the leads. It also doesn’t help the film that she doesn’t come across as drab, but rather as very pretty.

During the Depression, Sidney often portrayed the girlfriend or sister of a gangster. A busy actress, she appeared in five films in 1931, including City Streets, and Street Scene. Later in the decade, she would appear in Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage and Fritz Lang's Fury (both 1936). That same year, she also appeared in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, an early three-strip Technicolor film. About this time, Sidney was one of the highest-paid actresses in the industry, earning $10,000 per week and was the star of You Only Live Once and Dead End (both 1937).

For modern audiences, she might be best remembered for her appearances in the TV shows, WKRP in Cincinnati, Thirtysomething, Starsky & Hutch, The Love Boat, Magnum, P.I., and Trapper John, M.D., as well as her appearance as an afterlife caseworker in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988).

I have read recently, this overlooked first film telling of Dreiser’s book is "a surprisingly powerful and satisfying piece of work.” I disagree. The story is not told very well, too much is left out, and the film relies on an actor to carry the last third, who really isn’t up to the challenge. While neither the film nor its 1951 remake A Place in the Sun is a feel-good film, it is no surprise the latter has received more attention.