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An American Tragedy (film)
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Wikipedia article
'An American Tragedy' (1931) is a pre-Code drama film directed by Josef von Sternberg. It was produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures. The film is based on Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel 'An American Tragedy' and the 1926 play adaptation. These were based on the historic 1906 murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette at Big Moose Lake in upstate New York.'The American Film Institute Catalog Feature Films: 1931-1940' by the American Film Institute, c. 1993
The novel would again be adapted in the 1951 Paramount release 'A Place in the Sun'.
Cast
*Phillips Holmes as Clyde Griffiths
*Sylvia Sidney as Roberta Alden
*Frances Dee as Sondra Finchley
*Irving Pichel as District Attorney Orville Mason
*Frederick Burton as Samuel Griffiths
*Claire McDowell as Mrs. Samuel Griffiths
*Wallace Middleton as Gilbert Griffiths
*Emmett Corrigan as Belknap
*Charles B. Middleton as Jephson
*Lucille La Verne as Mrs. Asa Griffiths
*Albert Hart as Titus Alden
*Fanny Midgley as Mrs. Alden
*Arnold Korff as Judge Oberwaltzer
*Russell Powell as Coroner Fred Heit
*William Bailey as Reporter in Courtroom (uncredited)
*Ed Brady as Train Brakeman (uncredited)
*Richard Cramer as Deputy Sheriff Kraut (uncredited)
*Claire Dodd as Gaile Warren (uncredited)
*George Irving as Mr. Finchley (uncredited)
*Arline Judge as Bella Griffiths (uncredited)
*Guy Oliver as Simeon Dinsmore (uncredited)
*Evelyn Peirce as Bertine Cranston (uncredited)
*Harry Stubbs as Court Clerk (uncredited)
*Nella Walker as Hotel Guest (uncredited)
Background
Paramount Pictures purchased the film rights for Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel 'An American Tragedy' for $150,000. The widely acclaimed Russian director Sergei Eisenstein was hired to film an adaptation, with Dreiser's enthusiastic support. When Eisenstein was unable to procure studio approval for his "deterministic treatment," reflecting a Marxist perspective, he abandoned the project.
Paramount, with $500,000 already invested in the film, enlisted Josef von Sternberg to develop and direct his own film version of the novel. Dreiser was guaranteed by contract the right to review the script before production, and complained bitterly that the Sternberg-Hoffenstein interpretation of his novel's themes "outraged the book." When the film was completed, it was clear that the Sternberg screenplay had rejected any interpretation attributing protagonist Clyde Griffiths' antisocial behavior to a capitalist society and a strict religious upbringing, but rather located the problem in "the sexual hypocrisy of the [petty-bourgeois] social class." As Sternberg acknowledged in his memoirs: "I eliminated the sociological elements, which, in my opinion, were far from being responsible for the dramatic accident with which Dreiser concerned himself."
Dreiser sued Paramount Pictures to suppress the film but lost.
Reception
Film historian John Baxter wrote that 'An American Tragedy' "met with mixed critical success. 'The New York Times' called it 'emphatically stirring," the 'New York Daily News' wrote it is 'intensely dramatic, moving, superbly acted', but many other papers, recalling Dreiser's protest, found the film less intense that the original novel, which is undoubtedly the case."
Marxist film critic Harry Alan Potamkin commented on "Sternberg's failure to understand Dreiser's larger thematic purpose: Before the story opens [Sternberg presents] repeated shots of water disturbed by a thrown object. And throughout the picture the captions are composed upon a background of rippling water. Sternberg saw the major idea of the matter [theme] in the drowning. How lamentable!"
The film fared poorly at American theaters but was well-received among European moviegoers.
Theme
John Baxter identifies a thematic element in the struggle for human control over their destinies:
Critic Andrew Sarris singles out the following scene for its thematic significance:
References
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Further reading
* Tibbetts, John C., and James M. Welsh, eds. 'The Encyclopedia of Novels Into Film' (2nd ed. 2005) pp 1517.
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