The Conquering Power

Conquering Power, The (1921)

*** (out of 4)

The impressive silent film starts off with one of the strangest titles cards I've ever read. The film, obviously meant to be played at least a hundred years before 1921, has a title card that tells us current movie goers don't care for costume dramas so they've updated the story to 1921 times. In the film, Rudolph Valentino plays a playboy who has everything he wants in life but his father comes home, obviously upset, and asks him to go stay with his uncle (Ralph Lewis) for a little while. When the playboy reaches his uncle's home he learns that his father has killed himself but his cousin (Alice Terry) is there to comfort him and soon the two fall in love. The problems are just starting because her father is an evil man that only cares about money and will stop at nothing to keep them apart even if one must die. This film is probably best remembered for having a big influence on Greed and that isn't the only reason people should seek this film out. Ingram does a great job in the direction even though the material isn't the strongest that it could have been. I think a little stronger screenplay would have helped the film but there's no doubt that this film contains one of the most memorable scenes in silent history. I wasn't overly thrilled with Terry who I feel somewhat weights the film down with her mediocre performance but Valentino comes off quite strong. The scene stealer is certainly Lewis who turns in a great performance as the wicked father. The evilness of his character certainly jumps off the screen and Lewis does a great job at playing it. The highlight of the film comes towards the end when Lewis is trapped in a room where ghosts of the people his greed as destroyed or killed come to haunt him. The way this scene is shot, with light coming in through a hole in the roof, is extremely well done but it also has a very creepy and eerie tone throughout. This certainly isn't a horror film but this sequence is among the greatest I've seen in any of the silent horrors I've watched.

I've just watched the Alice Terry, Valentino movie The Conquering Power. While I enjoyed the movie, it didn't have the power and emotional scale of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The story is about the power of love over seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

The focus here is on the director's wife, Alice Terry, and she's up for the challenge, her lovely face registering a myriad of emotions, but it seemed unrealistic that she fell in love with her own cousin played by Valentino so quickly, that she was willing to wait for him as years passed without word as she was subjected to so much abuse from her father.

The morality angle about the obsession of greed and the way it's depicted as a monster that eventually crushes the person obsessed, really reminded me very much of the movie Greed, but in a much smaller, more intimate little film.

You can tell that there must have been some falling out between the director Rex Ingram and Valentino, as his part is very small and secondary, as compared to the earlier film Horsemen. They never made another picture together, which was a shame. Valentino never got another director who was willing to take the same kinds of risks with him.

As the immediate follow-up to his anti-war saga FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE, Rex Ingram presented this rendition of Balzac's EUGENIE GRANDET. The story is nominally updated to the flapper era, but most of it takes place in a provincial town where everyone wears 19th century costumes anyway. As in the earlier film, Rudolph Valentino is a playboy [ with a poodle] who must prove himself, but he appears to somewhat less advantage here. Once again, Alice Terry sensitively plays his designated love object, but in a more traditional ingenue role. Ingram does not always stage scenes effectively, but his films are distinguished by appealingly natural acting: even the obsession of old miser Grandet is never overplayed. In fact, the most striking scene shows the old man hallucinating personifications of his beloved gold, a sequence which may have influenced Ingram's friend and colleague Erich von Stroheim when he filmed GREED. Ingram's celebrated visual talent and John Seitz's cinematography are hard to judge in the dim, unrestored print available. This film lacks the spectacle of FOUR HORSEMEN, but still manages to suggest Balzac's sweep in portraying the complexity of human relations. The "conquering power," according to an introductory title, is Love.

Even though Rudolph Valentino is billed as the lead (in the version I saw, anyway) he is not on screen all that much and is more of a supporting character. It is really the story of Pere Grandet (well played by Ralph Lewis) and how his life has been, figuratively and literally, crushed by gold (the final scenes in which he is trapped in his cellar with the ghosts of people his greed has destroyed and is taunted by a snake-armed, leering golden demon are very disturbing). Still, even though his role was comparatively small, Valentino makes a strong impression as Charles Grandet, the spoilt son of a rich man whose essential decency, like that of Julio Desnoyer, is brought out by adversity and the love of a good woman . At the beginning of the movie he is hosting a wild birthday party for himself, but twenty minutes into the picture his father has committed suicide and Charles has become dependent on his wealthy but miserly uncle, Pere Grandet . At his uncle's home he meets and falls in love with his beautiful country mouse of a cousin, Eugenie, played by Alice Terry whose ethereal blondeness contrasts well with Valentino's dark good looks and who with the possible exception of Vilma Banky was his most memorable leading lady.

Objections have been sometimes raised to the liberties the screenwriter, June Mathis, took with Balzac's novel. A title card at the beginning of the picture tells the audience that "commercialization" has told the producers that it dislike costume pictures; evidently commercialism also told them that audiences don't like unhappy endings or unlikable leads, hence the sentimentalizing of the original story in which Charles Grandet and Eugenie are happily reunited at the end of the film. In the novel, Charles wastes Eugenie's gold and quickly forgets about her (making her gift seem more rash than romantic), and the conquering power does indeed turn out to be greed, not love as the movie would have it. If one is able to accept the movie on its own term (which of course can be difficult if you're familiar with the original source), Mathis's changes work well enough, however. Other complaints about the movie have involved the disorienting change of setting from Paris to the countryside--in the Paris scenes the people are dressed in modern (1920's) fashions, but the clothing and lifestyles of the country people has a very nineteenth century look to them. It is conceivable, however, that in the days before modern media had permeated everywhere fashions in isolated villages would change more slowly.

On the whole, this is one Valentino's stronger movies—it was a shame that irreconcilable professional and personal differences between Rex Ingram and Valentino led to the latter's departure from Metro shortly afterwards as there he was being offered the sort of quality scripts he would spent the rest of his short career trying to find.

This movie from one of the masters of silent cinema Rex Ingram is a melodrama without its excess. Certain scenes show you the power of silent cinema over sound such as the hallucinatory sequence showing a man's dependency and folly on wealth. Valentino is solid as the rich playboy who loses everything and is forced to live with his miserly Uncle who intends to cheat him out of his inheritance and Terry is solid too as the Miser's daughter who falls in love with Val and learns humility and virtue along the way. The story like all epic sagas spans many years. Here is where I'll knock the movie. It is obvious the movie is truncated from the book and a lot of detail is left out. If made today, it would obviously be almost three hours long. I don't know if it would make a better movie but it would be more detailed. Ingram though turns the movie into a study of greed and love as polar opposites in the avail of human survival and in that aspect, the movie scores. Just to add, the movie opens with an inter-title telling the audience that since polling (they had NRG in the twenties too) showed that audiences did not like costume pictures, the movie had been moved to a modern setting. Funny for in a few years the costume picture would dominate the industry and oscillate but never die ever since.