An American Tragedy (1931)

Josef von Sternberg's An American Tragedy doesn't quite reach the summit of the director's masterpieces, but it is a very good adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's novel. My Dad said of A Place in the Sun (the 1951 adaptation of the novel), that every male in the audience would have hit Shelley Winters on the head with an oar in order to be with the astonishingly ravishing Elizabeth Taylor. This version is more balanced and hews more closely to Dreiser's work. Phillips Holmes' protagonist is not portrayed as sympathetically as Montgomery Clift was in George Stevens' film and, unfortunately, is not half the actor Clift was. Sternberg portrays him as more of a sociopath than Stevens would. Stevens' loving close-ups of a trysting Clift and Taylor, glowing in all their youthful beauty, tipped the audience's sympathies in their favor. Winters was typed by her portrayal as a whining slattern, while Sternberg gives her character more of a fair shake as embodied by the wonderful Sylvia Sydney; an actress I am inordinately fond of. After the stock market crash, audiences of the time would have been more inclined to sympathize with Ms. Sydney's working girl than Frances Dee's high society lass.

Sternberg is chiefly remembered for the deliriously romantic expressionism of his Dietrich pictures, but there is a social realist aspect to his early work that can be found here in the factory scenes. Tracking shots with metronomic industrial sounds convey the repetitive, soul and body crushing nature of factory work. This is contrasted with lakeside romantic scenes which glisten with Lee Garmes' expert cinematography. Irving Pichel chews the scenery nicely as a DA in courtroom sequences which benefit from rapidly paced editing. An American Tragedy is middling Sternberg, but it confirms to me that he was one of the ten or so best directors working in the American cinema before World War 2.