The Sorrows of Satan

A young Ricardo Cortez struggles to play against type as a struggling writer in this Faustian tale directed by the great D W Griffith, who, by this stage in his career, was a director for hire whose best years were behind him. A few strong moments, but it never really captures our attention.

After an introduction showing a war between angels and the transformation of Lucifer and his cohorts into demons (!!!), we move to contemporary times and meet would-be writer Geoffrey Tempest (Ricardo Cortez), who lives in a shabby boardinghouse across the hall from another struggling writer, Mavis (Carol Dempster). After Geoffrey makes a comment about selling his soul for money, Prince Lucio (Adolphe Menjou) appears at his door with news that Geoffrey has inherited a vast fortune. Lucio tempts the young man with the expensive life, including sultry temptress Olga (Lya De Putti), but will the love of wholesome Mavis be enough to save Geoffrey's eternal soul?

While the proceedings run slowly at times, Griffith throws in enough memorable imagery to make this worthwhile. I particularly liked a scene where the demonic shadow of Lucio looms over Geoffrey. Menjou is dapper, slim and perfect in his role. Dempster, the last of Griffith's "favorite ladies" after the Gish sisters and Mae Marsh, retired from the screen after this film. She wasn't much liked by critics at the time, but I thought she was good here.

Sorrows of Satan, The (1926)

*** (out of 4)

The final of three films made by D.W. Griffith at Paramount. A poor writer (Ricardo Cortez) living in poverty desperately wants to marry his girlfriend (Carol Dempster) but the lack of money won't allow it. One day, after cursing God, a man (Adolphe Menjou) appears out of nowhere offering the writer tons of money but there will be a price to pay. This is another retelling of Faust but it manages to be entertaining throughout due in large part to some very good performances. The only downside is that Griffith, who was legendary for refusing to go ahead with technology, edits and shoots this in a way that it seems like a film from 1915 and not one from 1926. Technically the film is pretty flat but Griffith makes for a very fast paced 90-minutes and delivers and effective and chilling ending. The opening sequence of Satan being kicked out of Heaven is also nicely done.

For many years Griffith had wanted to do Faust. He tried to get Lillian Gish to join him in the project, but she, quite rightly, declined saying that Faust had been a flop every time it had been tried with American audiences on the stage or screen. Instead she convinced him to do Orphans of the Storm (1921). Undaunted, however, Griffith took a wack at it several years after Orphans in this, The Sorrows of Satan (1926). Instead of Gish he had Carol Dempster.

Much has been said about Carol; how Griffith ruined his career by trying to make her a star; how she was his girlfriend (she wasn't) and how she was essentially responsible for his demise. This is, I feel, a gross exaggeration. She was an actress trying to make her living and doing the best she could. She was not a great actress, and Griffith often miscast her. In this film she is not badly cast. She plays a sweet, gentle and fairly pathetic girl with a heart of gold. A role she played very superbly well in Griffith's final masterpiece, "Isn't Life Wonderful" - made just two years earlier. Although this is not a great performance, Carol seems sincere and she has one of the better parts of this film.

The real cause of Griffith's demise is Griffith himself. He had abandoned so many of the things that made him great, In is early days on "Birth of a Nation," he would take his working cut to a small town and play it in the local theater to get the audience reaction. When he finally did release it, he knew that it would go over well with the audience. Between that film and this, he had let the justified praise for his skill go to his head. He had given up that practice thinking that his own taste was sure to be a success. (Faust no less) His judgment had been fogged by drinking, and a somewhat maudlin visions of great art. In truth, he was indulging in the greatest evil of an artist - a contempt for the ignorance of his audience.

I am a big Griffith fan and it hurts me to write this review, but just as there are some poor parts to this film, there are also some very good ones. Adolphe Menjou is a wonderfully oily Satan. Ricardo Cortez and Lya De Putti put in solid performances. Much of this is a credit to Griffith's direction. The inter-cutting to create excitement is always a feature of a Griffith film and this one is no exception. The excellent review by wmorrow59 here gives some other good points. A very sparing use of titles makes the flow of the best sequences move very soothly, and saves some of the lesser sequences from being a total bore. Unfortunately these islands of excellence are placed among a general sea of mediocrity.

Any moments of delight are overshadowed by extremely slow pacing. There are times when people stand for over a minute motionless and just looking at each other for no real reason. At one point I mistakenly got up to see if there was something wrong with my set. Add to that a plot with no real surprises, and you have some very boring moments. Griffith's attempts at showing sin and excess are not a copy of DeMille, as on reviewer suggested, but a copy of his own style in Intolerance. (It was DeMille who copied Griffith - and admitted it - not the other way around.)Here, however, they seem very tame and stilted. The players look as though they are moving through a set routine and not having very much fun.

The whole film has a feel of being very old fashioned even for its time. Griffith was known to be old fashioned; he was known to be overly melodramatic, moralizing and somewhat arrogant. In his best films he either controlled these tendencies or overcame them with his great sense of humanity, his technical and innovative brilliance or his remarkable talent for making a mundane role seem important, relevant and real. In this film, however, he seems to have let his faults run to excess. It is HUBRIS (excess) writ large.

All in all, although the film is not wonderful, it is watchable and even entertaining - provided if you don't expect much. But there are far better films by Griffith, and if you love Griffith, it is a pity to see him wasting his talents.

When it was first published in 1895 Marie Corelli's novel "The Sorrows of Satan" was a sensational success, so much so that it made Corelli the best-selling author in English since Charles Dickens, a distinction she continued to hold for a number of years. Her wildly histrionic tale was essentially an update of the Faust legend set in "Gay '90s" London, which the author used as a vehicle to condemn what she considered the sinful excesses of the day, and to urge people back to the paths of righteousness. Readers lapped it up, and Corelli, the Barbara Cartland of her day, obligingly cranked out many more such works. However, as the new artistic and literary trends of the twentieth century kicked in, and popular attitudes and mores began to change, Corelli's works were increasingly regarded as dated and somewhat embarrassing relics of the Victorian era. Read today, her novels are hilariously awful, full of unintended humor on every page. "The Sorrows of Satan" in particular reads like the work of a precocious, feverishly inspired 9 year-old, albeit one with a pompous and highly moralistic sensibility.

One would think that by the mid-1920s this sort of thing would look hopelessly dated as potential movie material, but somehow the brass at Paramount Pictures came to believe it would be the ideal assignment for their distinguished contract director, David Wark Griffith. Griffith, whose glory days were already past, had formerly been working independently and releasing his films through United Artists, which he co-founded, but he had lost his independence along with his New York studio for a number of reasons, including financial ineptitude and poor choice of material. More specifically, he had lost touch with his audience. Times were changing fast in the Roaring Twenties, and Griffith couldn't keep up. It's significant that the Paramount moguls believed this aging literary property would be just the thing for their aging director, who was himself something of a throwback to the Good Old Days.

So, Griffith adapted Corelli's Faust tale, updating the story once more to the present, and casting handsome Ricardo Cortez as struggling author Geoffrey Tempest, led astray by Adolphe Menjou's suave "Prince Lucio," i.e. Satan in disguise. As in Griffith's past half-dozen films the leading lady would be his girlfriend, Carol Dempster, a modestly talented and rather mousy-looking actress who was not widely appreciated. Cinema historians continue to puzzle over the director's dogged attempts to foist Miss Dempster onto the public. The film, at any rate, was not terribly expensive to make, especially after the Paramount brass vetoed a storm-at-sea climax, and Griffith appears to have made a concerted effort to affect a more 'modern' style. The results? The Sorrows of Satan was a flop which got Griffith fired from Paramount and drove Carol Dempster into permanent retirement.

Seen today, The Sorrows of Satan isn't all that bad, but it isn't all that good, either, and it's not hard to see why it failed on first release. The biggest problem by far is the film's frustratingly draggy pace: the opening scenes in particular are very, very, VERY slow. It takes a lot longer than it should to introduce our two leads and get the story rolling. Geoffrey Tempest (Cortez) and Mavis Claire (Dempster) are both struggling authors who live across the hall from each other in a shabby boarding house. When they go out together for a meal, it feels like their every gesture and expression is held a beat or so too long. When they decide to go get a marriage license, their every move is painstakingly (and unnecessarily) spelled out for the viewer. What's worse, we aren't given much reason to care about them. It feels like years before Adolphe Menjou's Prince Lucio shows up to tempt Geoffrey into sin, and frankly he's most welcome. Things do indeed pick up when Satan steps in -- Menjou is terrific in the role - - and we're treated to glimpses of decadent nightclub floor shows, and garden parties where guests are dressed as Nymphs and Satyrs. In short, Griffith makes like Cecil B. DeMille, and it's all very Twenties, but somehow the movie still doesn't quite click. We're kept at a distance from these characters, and just when things start to get interesting the camera pulls away, and the tempo slows down again.

The best sequence comes when Geoffrey, now wealthy but miserable, married to an exotic Russian princess in exile, wakes up in his Xanadu-like mansion sensing that something is wrong. His wife has cornered Prince Lucio in a drawing room downstairs, and is confessing that she married Geoffrey only to be near him (i.e Satan). Geoffrey creeps down the stairs and finds his wife throwing herself at Lucio's feet. It's a suspenseful, well-edited sequence, consisting of shadowy shots of the mansion which look creepy and menacing, and happily there are no intrusive title cards inserted to break up the rhythm.

But the ending is disappointingly flat, and we're left feeling deflated. The actors aren't to blame. Adolphe Menjou was ideally cast as the suave Lucio, and it's too bad he never played the role in a talkie. Ricardo Cortez has a nicely expressive face, and even Carol Dempster kind of grows on you after awhile (her washed-out, careworn appearance helps gains sympathy for the mistreated Mavis) but we are never given much reason to root for them. The director keeps us at a distance from the lead characters; perhaps he didn't care for the material much, himself. Griffith's Sorrows of Satan is an unusual and mildly diverting film -- that is, if you can get past the leaden opening scenes -- but general audiences, especially those unaccustomed to silent movies, would do just as well to skip it. Marie Corelli's novel is highly recommended, however: it's a hoot!