Carrie

Based on the novel Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, William Wyler's Carrie is a melodrama through and through, the sort of thing that recalls earlier efforts like Jezebel or Wuthering Heights. It's also something of a compromised work to fit in with the Hays Office's mandates on morality in film at the time, something that also hampered Detective Story. It's obvious that Wyler was trying to push as far as he could under the strictures that he was operating, but unlike someone like Alfred Hitchcock who was unquestionably on the top of the industry in multiple ways, including, most importantly, financially, Wyler was making more dramatic fare than sensationalist while his films rarely made Hitchcock money.

Carrie Meeber (Jennifer Jones) is a hayseed who decides to go to Chicago to make her fortune, following after her sister who married a stockyard worker and is making her living in a hovel in the slums of the major Midwestern city. On the train in, she meets Charles (Eddie Albert), a slick operator and traveling salesman based in Chicago who gives her his card in the hope of further contact. After she loses her job at a boot manufacturers sweatshop, she calls up Charles in the hope of finding a job, but he quickly captures her into his illicit web by getting her to live in his apartment with her without marrying her. She also meets a man who runs a high class establishment, George Hurstwood (Laurence Olivier).

The whole dramatic angle of the first half of the film is Carrie moving from one illicit situation to another because while Charles dotes on her in his own skeevy way (he may even love her in a way that's not terribly standard), Carrie falls in love with George who immediately falls in love with her back. The problem is that George is already married to Julie (Miriam Hopkins) with two grown children. However, through some machinations on Julie's part, she is the effective owner of every major piece of his property, and she won't divorce him. She'd rather seem him squirm than happy, and George is desperate for his own happiness.

It's about here where the film becomes George's, and he doesn't let go until the final twenty minutes or so. It's a good thing that Olivier is a really good actor because he makes this section, which does feel a mite overlong, work as well as it does. It's a portrait of a man on a self-destructive course because he simply wants to be happy, so he's willing to throw everything away to be with the one woman he loves. It's a downward spiral that involves theft, lying, and deception. Combine that with the thinly veiled prostituting of herself that Carrie goes through, and you have some basic elements of a Billy Wilder movie, a comparison I was actually considering early in the film.

I suppose I was slightly thrown by the change in focus as Carrie became a minor character in the movie named after her, sitting at home while George goes out and tries to make a new living in New York, his recent history following him wherever he goes so he can't keep a job. It's a showcase for Olivier in one of his more subtle performances, a marked contrast to some of his bigger moments in Wuthering Heights, and his tragic downfall, brought on by his own choices, is carried entirely by Olivier. There's little else to hold it up since it becomes an almost episodic series of events that relay that downfall.

Carrie reasserts herself towards the end when she gets confronted with the fact that George never actually got a divorce from Julie, making him a bigamist, and that they just keep getting poorer and poorer. So, she makes her own way, and that her rise to her own fame is covered in a quick montage feels like it's a cheat to her, since this is nominally her story. It ends on a tragic note, and that note ends up being George's (changed from the novel to make it less explicit in how he ends).

I found the film a small success, probably the least of Wyler's work. It keeps demonstrating how Wyler could make something out of very little through his sheer talent and ability with the technical sides of filmmaking in addition to his management of actors. Jennifer Jones might have been more of a plaything for her husband David O. Selznick than a serious actress (though, she definitely had some good performances in her like in The Song of Bernadette), but she holds her own well enough here. The show really belongs to Olivier, though, and combined with Wyler's direction, he delivers a surprisingly nuanced performance of self-destruction. He's the main joy of the film because the actual story is straight up melodrama given no real dimension to latch onto. That I feel the film succeeds despite that is a surprise to me.

Still, this is probably Wyler's least film. It's something that feels compromised by needs of the studio to push forward a big actor and clean up the action for the Hays Office. I'm reminded of The Plough and the Stars by John Ford, a work that was also diminished by studio demands but still managed to work despite them.

This is a curious little sleeper from 1952, a grim, objective look at the upward mobility of a country girl who first adapts to the needs of the men around her, and then moves on to a successful stage career on her own, leaving one of the men in abject poverty.

Today Carrie succeeds not only because of it's splendid recreation of a time, but as one of the few American vehicles where the legendary Laurence Olivier, (who often walked through a character role for the paycheck) performs to his best advantage, evolving from an assured man of the world to a pathetic morsel at the bottom of the heap, a restrained and beautifully measured performance given 13 years later than his dynamic Heathcliff for the same directer in 1939's Wuthering Heights.

Jennifer Jones, too, is a good deal less hysterical and florid than usual; the music score by David Raksin underscores without bombast, and the supporting cast provide excellent contrast. This is definitely not a cheerer-upper, but a picture neatly tuning into it's original author's concerns. It deserves another look, and as time goes by, will be considered one of Wyler's significant contributions.

At a time when many cineasts are beginning to respond to the beauties of Powell and Pressburger's "Gone to Earth", Wyler's "Carrie", that other most underrated masterpiece, continues to attract too little appreciative attention. It is not difficult to see why insofar that its depressing subject material is incompatible with audience expectations of its genre, Hollywood studio romanticism. It has a hero who slides into despair and degradation whilst the heroine succeeds in her chosen profession as an aspiring actress. Women who take their handkerchiefs to the cinema have always seemed indifferent to the film: indeed the only admirers I have personally found have been male, possibly identifying with the debonaire restaurateur, Hurstwood (magnificently played by Laurence Olivier), sowing the seeds of his downfall through human weakness which destroys everything except his innate dignity. Had the film been set in its own period (mid 20th century) and directed by, say, a De Sica or Kurosawa, we might still be talking about it. Instead it is set shortly after the beginning of the century, a transitional period when the romantic past was rapidly being overcome by the grainy realism of a new mechanised age. However, far from being weakened by the genre conventions of a highly romantic approach,the superbly crafted direction by William Wyler, photography perfectly composed by Victor Milner and a wonderfully lyrical score by David Raksin are elements that serve to enhance the material. They never sentimentalise it, somehow proving that when as here the Hollywood romantic cinema was given a really mature theme and text, it could, in the hands of some of its greatest craftsmen, be responsible for producing a work of the highest cinematic art.

Lawrence Olivier plays a man that's comfortably off in the high society of Chicago at the end of the 19th century. He'll risk everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) for the love of a young lady. Of course, if the young lady is Jennifer Jones then it really makes some sense. The family, the money, the social status... that's nothing compare with that angel face and the ingenuity of a country girl.

"Carrie" is a big time melodrama. If you think that Scarlett O'Hara had a rough time, wait and see the descent into hell of Olivier's character. The journey of Sir Laurence from the days of wine and roses to the misery and the wandering is just overwhelming... (what can you expect of one of the best actors ever??).

Don't you forget your handkerchief!

*My rate: 8/10

Not for nothing is Laurence Olivier heralded as one of the greatest actors of our time, and if ever a film proved it, it's "Carrie," an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie."

Dreiser is the man who brought us "An American Tragedy," remade as "A Place in the Sun." Poor Dreiser - he must have been one miserable human being to write such stories of man's desolation.

"Carrie" is the story of a distinguished man, George Hurstwood (Olivier) who runs a large Chicago restaurant, and how his obsession with a beautiful young woman, Carrie (Jennifer Jones) destroys his social standing, his reputation, and his life.

Miserable in a loveless marriage to Julie (Miriam Hopkins), George meets Carrie while she is living with a salesman, Charlie (Eddie Albert). One thing that the film points out is that there were so very few opportunities for women in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th.

After losing her job due to injury at a shoe-making factory, Carrie drifts into friendship and then is seduced into a relationship with Charlie. She is never comfortable with the arrangement and wants to get married.

Very naive and inexperienced at life, when she falls in love with George, she expects him to marry her, not realizing that he's already married. An angry, vicious Julie goes to George's boss with the tale of her husband's immorality.

After a confrontation with his boss and Julie, George panics, takes money he intended to give to the restaurant owner, and runs away with Carrie. Thus, he becomes a fugitive. But his troubles are just beginning.

William Wyler skillfully directed this film, which has one of Olivier's best screen performances as George. "I want love!" he screams at his wife. "And I intend to have that before I die!"

Desperate, obsessed, weak, but proud, Olivier gives a fully fleshed-out portrayal of a man at the end of his rope whose great passion - in a more devastating way - will ruin his life almost as surely as his suppression of passion would have. How he wasn't nominated for an Oscar is a true mystery; it is one of the all-time great film portrayals. He will break your heart.

As Carrie, Jennifer Jones is excellent as an unhappy young woman who, because of poverty, innocence, and George's determination, is dragged into a downward spiral. She is dazzlingly beautiful and one can see her grow from a vapid, victimized girl into a woman who hides her resentment and has a strong resolve.

Jones has been criticized for being passive in this part - but it's a passive role. She's a young country girl in the big city at a time when society was totally male-oriented and most doors were closed to her.

She is the cause of George's destruction, but not on purpose. George is such a weak man that the only type of person he could ever dominate would be someone like Carrie - and finally, he isn't even able to dominate her.

Hopkins was a master at playing a shrew, but more than that, she was a brilliant actress who knew the art of playing period pieces, as she demonstrated so admirably in "The Heiress."

Eddie Albert is good in the familiar role of a likable salesman, but it had an added twist - this one had ulterior motives, but he was so smiley and gregarious, you almost couldn't believe it.

Well worth seeing but have a box of tissues nearby. You'll ask yourself, too, how Olivier and the film could have been overlooked at Oscar time.