FANatic-10

Understandably, this 85 year old film is quite dated and stilted by now, but it nevertheless has an 8.2 rating on IMDb. Seemingly the entire Marion Davies fan club must have voted it a ten, because otherwise this vote makes no sense at all. Davies isn't even good in it, though she looks lovely. Leslie Howard is stiff, Richard Bennett has moments where he seems to be struggling to remember his dialogue, and Irene Rich and Douglass Montgomery are absent for long periods of time, their characters there simply to make plot points. Montgomery actually has some good scenes, but then at the end is involved in a climactic scene that really comes out of nowhere. Basically, this is just for Marion Davies fans, who apparently think anything she was in is gold.

This Paramount adaptation of a Theodore Dreiser novel (whose "An American Tragedy" Sylvia Sidney had starred in two years previously) gives Sidney another juicy role in a well filmed melodrama, a classic "women's film". Donald Cook is also excellent as Jennie's life-long love and Edward Arnold too, in a smaller but key role. My only disappointment was that Mary Astor, who makes a vivid impression, has a relatively nothing part to play and her screen time is limited. Rarely seen, like many early Paramount films, try to catch this if you see it, especially if you are a fan of big, weepy 1930's female star vehicles, ala "Stella Dallas" or "Back Street".

Although it would have been nice to see a well-restored and cleaned-up print of this, which was not the case, it still seems an exceptionally well made film for its era. The camera work was fluid and the sound was decent. It is a rich, provocative study with much to think about. While famously seen as a lesbian story, and that is part of it to be sure, it also concerns the rigid authoritarianism of its particular time and place, which soon led to so much sorrow and tragedy and sends out a strong feminist and tolerant message. The story is never boring and easily holds one's interest these many years later. It is strongly atmospheric and immerses one in the hothouse environs of the strictly disciplined, all-female world, where the girls develop close and intimate relationships and passionate crushes on their favorite teacher, Dorothea Wieck. She is fine here, and so is Hertha Thiele as Manuela, the primary focus of the story, but then the entire cast performs well, including Erika Mann, daughter of Thomas Mann and wife of W.H. Auden, as a bespectacled, tattle-tale instructor always running to the head of the school. The ending sent out a strong message and worked well, though you are left on your own to wonder how things resolved themselves as per the two lead characters. Well worthwhile to see if you can find it!