"Man, Woman, and Sin" (1927) stars John Gilbert, Jeanne Eagels, Gladys Brockwell, Marc McDermott, Hayden Stevenson, Charles K. French and others in a story about a very naive boy (Gilbert) who has a gnawing ambition that leads him from the ink-stained pressroom of a newspaper where he's not much more than a copy boy to a decent cub reporter. He's only about eighteen. Meantime, he falls for the society editor, Jeanne Eagels, but he doesn't realize that she is the kept woman of Bancroft, the married owner and chief editor of the newspaper. Eagels is obviously supposed to be a little older than Gilbert, and she genuinely feels something for Gilbert, but she's bound to a lifestyle that she's gotten herself into, and she's stuck in it. Still, she both teases the situation with Gilbert and plays both ends against the middle until Gilbert goes unannounced to her lovely apartment and, after entering, proposes to Eagels. At the near same time, Bancroft (played by Marc McDermott) comes in and interrupts the proposal. A fight ensues, during which altercation Gilbert kills Bancroft, though not purposefully. Yet...he's sentenced to death, much of the evidence having been based on statements by Eagels who was coerced into a false testimony.
A large subplot that runs through the narrative is the mother-son relationship, Brockwell and Gilbert, which begins when Gilbert was a very poor young boy in a neighborhood where he lives in the alleyway area of a better outer neighborhood and is shunned by the parents of young children his age, parents who think their families are much better than "the dirty little boy" and his mother, one who sews and irons for pennies for a living. Brockwell and Gilbert make a fine team, struggling through it all alone, with Gilbert finally rising above the grindingly poor situation and finding himself in love with the society editor of a newspaper, and making $25 a week. Gilbert's mother senses something wrong in the relationship of Gilbert and Eagels, but her cautionary remarks only anger Gilbert.
The acting in this melodrama is superb! Eagels is particularly fine. When she is at the courtroom where she testifies for the prosecution she swaggers through her movements, though we as the audience see that she is only trying to prove to herself she must do this testimony when she knows in her heart she doesn't want to do any such thing. It is a testimony to her strength as an actress that she can get through to an audience several feelings and sub-feelings at one time, ambiguity and ambivalence all wrapped in one. Gilbert, who played such a cad in "Love", made the same year, here shaves off his mustache, cleans himself into a boy, and plays not just an innocent, but a very naive boy. It's quite a contrast, and it shows what a fine actor he could be. Brockwell, who played enough wicked foils in her early career, here plays an emotionally caring mother, and plays her well, somewhat one dimensional, but nevertheless well enough to make us watch and care.
Monta Bell directs carefully, slowly and deliberately, sometimes too slowly and too deliberately, but in the end gets the job done well. The saving grace for all the deliberateness is the beautiful photography. The cinematography is done by Percy Hilburn who lensed "Ben-Hur" (1925), "The Mysterious Island" (1929), and several of Lon Chaney, Sr.'s films. The subtlety and darkly mysterious character of the photography, especially the lighting, gives much depth to the film.
If the plot sounds vaguely familiar to early sound buffs it's because the film was re-made only four years later in 1931 with Lew Ayres in the Gilbert rôle and Genevieve Tobin in the Eagels rôle, only it was re-named "Up for Murder".
