Perdição por Amor

Melodrama had come a long way between the thirties austere black and white Stahl tear-jerkers to the fifties flaming Sirk extravaganzas ,which were often remakes of the first director's works ( "when tomorrow comes" "imitation of life" "magnificent obsession")

At the beginning of the fifties ,Wyler -who had already approached melodrama ("Mrs Minniver","little foxes" and even elements of his admirable "best years of our lives) opted for full bore weepie,the "enough is enough" genre and thus anticipated on the great maudlin movies of the fifties which was another golden era for the style,not only Douglas Sirk but also Minelli,Cukor,Dmytryk ,King... Jennifer Jones ,the romantic actress par excellence ,is the bridge between the two eras:she has nothing to do with Irene Dunne or Margaret Sullavan because she's primarily an intuitive:her face is constantly longing for the love which ceaselessly eludes her :no actress succeeded as she did as far romantic passion is concerned ("duel in the sun" "madame Bovary" "Ruby Gentry" are good examples).

And yet,despite the title,the plot focuses on Olivier's character.the great thespian is very moving,going from riches to rag with equal command.The plot encompasses everything that makes a melodrama a delight for afficionados of the genre.Olivier's downfall is almost realist -and sometimes recalls Murnau's "der Letzte Mann" (1924).Wyler depicts his plight and humiliation in lavish detail .That's strange,because ,generally ,man is spared in melodramas .

The legendary depth of field you can find in any Wyler movie is used with great results in the scenes when Carrie comes for the first time in the luxury restaurant where she's invited.

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 filming of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie focuses more on Laurence Olivier's character of George Hurstwood more than on the title character that Jennifer Jones portrays. In the novel, Carrie is not quite as good a girl as Jennifer portrays her. But that is probably due to 1950s conventions and David O. Selznick's svengali-like influence on his wife's career.

It's not a film that ranks high with Olivier fans. In fact he did it to keep himself busy while current wife Vivien Leigh was doing A Streetcar Named Desire. But his portrayal of George Hurstwood may rank as the most tragic character Olivier ever brought to the screen.

Poor Hurstwood. On the outside a most respectable individual, good job wife and two kids, money in the bank. He's the manager of a fancy Chicago eatery named Fitzgerald's. And one day accompanied by Eddie Albert, walks Jennifer Jones into his place and he flips for her.

Carrie's a young girl from the farm gone to Chicago to seek life. But women were rather restricted in their employment and their options for living. She runs up against Victorian morality which was what Dresier was really writing about in his book. To today's audiences those conventions seem ridiculous, but William Wyler does do a good job in portraying the era.

He also does another clever thing in the film. Mary Murphy has a brief part as Olivier's daughter. She bears a striking resemblance to Jennifer Jones. She has a couple of lines of inconsequential dialog with Olivier, but your image of her stays throughout the film and you understand why Olivier tumbles for Jones. Freud would approve.

Kudos also for Miriam Hopkins who plays Mrs. Hurstwood. She's a vindicative shrew in this film, but she's also a wronged party and Hopkins does convey a fine balance in her portrayal.

Eddie Albert is also a wronged party. Jones meets him on the train to Chicago and he falls for her also. Due to circumstances in the film, she has to accept his hospitality. Albert also falls for her big time, but she can't see him when Olivier's around.

There is also a nice bit by Ray Teal as an insurance investigator. I can't tell you about him without giving some of the plot away, but he's a very cynical fellow and kind of gives both Jones and Olivier a reality check.

It's a nicely done film, fans of the stars will love it.

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.

This is a superb film, directed with great style by William Wyler. A tough film for romantics, it's about how following your heart will not always lead to living "happily ever after". A very mature film about becoming middle-aged but still yearning for romance - and a very uncompromising film in which love and forgiveness are sometimes just not enough. An unusual film to come out of Hollywood in the Fifties, it now emerges as one of the finest American films of that period.

Jennifer Jones, Eddie Albert and Miriam Hopkins all deliver top-notch performances - subtle, believable, multi-dimensional and real. Hopkins remains one of the most under-rated of all Hollywood stars - her reputation sadly damaged by her real-life feud with Bette Davis. But she was a brilliant actress. Jones looks stunning, and portrays her character's development from naivety to worldliness with intelligence and strength. Albert is likeable, but also quite menacing, as her salesman lover.

But towering above all is the great Laurence Olivier, in what I venture to say is his best screen performance. As the ageing restauranter who finds true love too late, he gives an unbearably moving performance. His astonishing physical transformations match perfectly his character's downward fortunes - but there is also a complete truth to his emotion here. One wonders how much he was drawing on his own tragic marriage to Vivien Leigh to find that truth.

This is a ten star film.