And then the rewriting of history began.
I don’t know if one can dissect the career of William Dieterle — or more specifically, bemoan the fact that his name doesn’t enjoy wider recognition — without discussing the auteur theory. After World War II, France was in such financial ruin — and film budgets at such a premium — that directors were forced to scrape by on very little; their work became more personal — a consequence of them having few tools at their disposal other than their own imaginations. The French saw fit to praise them as “auteurs” (i.e, authors) because they exerted far more influence over their films than pre-war directors. Theoretician André Bazin had already suggested that the best films bear their maker’s “signature”; in 1954, critic François Truffaut went so far as to insist that the director is the true author of a film. (Truffaut directed his first short that same year, so was his position perhaps a bit self-serving?) And in 1962, American film critic Andrew Sarris took it a step further; he came up with an auteur theory, a set of standards that he claimed boosted certain directors above their lowly colleagues. Three criteria had to be met: “the technical competence of a director... the distinguishable personality of the director... [and] tension between a director's personality and his material.”
It’s easy to punch holes in Sarris’s “theory.” To the first point, there are brilliant filmmakers who have little technique, but succeed on passion and instinct. To the second, there are awful directors who — lacking imagination — fall back on the same tropes time and again. And Sarris’s third assertion — that great art is produced by friction between the director and external forces — prompts him to deny the designation of “auteur” to most writer-directors (counterintuitive as that sounds), because they never faced the challenge of shooting a script they thought was unsalvageable. (The “my rules, my logic” posturing grows at times comic. If an actor shines brightly in a part, the auteur inspired them; the non-auteur was just the beneficiary of good casting.) But you don’t need to delve into the incongruities of the theory to dispute it, because Sarris leads off with an anecdote that’s laughable in its obliviousness. In Raoul Walsh’s 1935 film Every Night at Eight (which Sarris labels “one of the many maddeningly routine films Walsh has directed”), a character talks in his sleep, revealing his deep feelings for — and ultimately to — the woman he loves; in 1942's High Sierra, also directed by Walsh, the same sort of incident occurs. And according to Sarris, “If I had not been aware of Walsh in Every Night at Eight, the crucial link to High Sierra would have passed unnoticed. Such are the joys of the auteur theory.” Let that sink in. Sarris wouldn’t have bothered to check the directing credit for a pair of films — nor noticed that both contained a similar scene — without the existence of his “auteur theory.” (The failings of Sarris’s theory explain why, over 60 years later, no two people can seemingly agree on the definition of an auteur — or if it’s an accurate or even worthwhile term to begin with.)
Each time Sarris and his colleagues crowned a new auteur, they turned rhetorical somersaults to elevate even their biggest stinkers into works of art. But what about the directors who didn’t make the cut? Well, in that case, Sarris saw fit to not only ignore but denigrate their work. (The club had to be kept exclusive, after all.) And thus you find him minimizing the impact of William Dieterle — whose talents had been hailed by critics, audiences and the Academy alike, and who was commonly seen as one of the filmmakers who helped revolutionize Hollywood — with almost calculated perversity: “Dieterle was around on the set when many interesting things happened over the years, and it is reasonable to assume that he had something to do with them." This is the auteur theory at his worst. Sarris, having determined that Dieterle is not an auteur, feels obliged to deny him all agency. And because few of Dieterle’s films were at that time available for viewing, the disregard for Dieterle displayed by Sarris and his hangers-on snowballed, with a new generation of authors mischaracterizing his work with bizarre claims, backhanded compliments and outright inaccuracies:
”During the 30s Dieterle was mostly respected for his pedantic technical proficiency." — The Film Encyclopedia"Though a minor, erratic talent, Dieterle is deserving of more serious critical attention." — Geoff Andrew (The Director's Vision)
"His films from 1953 [vie] with each other for awfulness." — David Quinlan (Illustrated Guide to Film Directors)
(Dieterle made only one film in 1953.)
When I started to delve more into vintage film in my 40’s, I was aghast that a Classic Hollywood director whom I so admired — who touched my heart in a way only a handful of others did — was being so summarily dismissed, and with almost focused intensity. But of course, the passage of time allows and encourages the truth to surface. And in the area of film criticism, new audiences who are actually able to watch the movies their predecessors merely passed judgment on can make their own assessments. And are. In most everything you see written about Dieterle over the last decade — especially since vast amounts of his catalog have been released from the studio vaults — you see writers railing against the old characterizations. You now see words like “genius,” “master,” “stylist” and “visionary” bandied about. But I haven’t seen anyone take a look back at Dieterle’s Hollywood career and give it its due. So permit me to make the case for William Dieterle.
Wilhelm Dieterle was one of a number of German actors brought to Hollywood by Warner Bros. in 1930. With the coming of sound, studios were determined not to lose the all-important foreign market, so they took to assembling foreign casts on the sets of their most popular films and creating foreign-language editions. Although Dieterle was engaged as an actor, Warner Bros. soon recognized his directorial skill, and put him to work directing the films as well as appearing in them. When the foreign-language experiment collapsed the following year, Warner Bros. offered him a directing deal, anglicizing his name to “William.”
Given the frivolous works Warners eventually assigned him to, it’s startling where they let him start: with a property he himself selected, an ambitious exploration of Fitzgerald’s “lost generation,” THE LAST FLIGHT (1931). John Monk Saunders’ screenplay — based on his novel Single Lady — follows four American fliers injured in action in World War I, as they try to chart a path forward. Their doctor urges them to “take the first boat home,” but none of them can envision a return stateside. Their nervous systems are damaged, their bodies broken — what are they good for? David Manners, whose spasmodic twitching of the muscles under his eye only recedes when he drinks, suggests a different plan: “Get tight!” — and when fellow pilot Richard Barthelmess asks, “And then what?”, the answer is obvious: “Stay tight.” So they recruit two more ex-fliers (Johnny Mack Brown and Elliott Nugent) and head to Paris, a haven for vets and expats — and when we rejoin the four of them a year later, they’re dressed to the nines and strolling the boulevard. Barthelmess suggests, “How about a cocktail?”, but the question is clearly rhetorical — as much a part of their nightly ritual as the consumption to come.
Despite the shoot being studio bound, Dieterle captures the look and feel of Paris during Les Années Folles, when nights had no meaning — when thirsty vets could migrate from hotel bar to outdoor café to dance hall, downing martinis each step of the way. Then a few hours of shut-eye, a prairie oyster to get them back on their feet, and another day of drinking. Dieterle captures the ex-fliers’ exploits in fast pans and slow crossfades — interspersed with surprising shifts of perspective — that mirror their slightly benumbed state. Everything seems narrowly out of focus, yet a bit too real; they’ve forgotten everything except how to force a good time. Even common courtesies escape them. When they meet a young woman (Helen Chandler) at a bar, they act like kids on a playground, like boys ganging up on the girl they secretly like. They tease her about her teeth, her nose, the fact that instead of a martini, she opts for a champagne cocktail. They lecture her for being ignorant of their frailties, then they denounce her for caring too much — because her caring interrupts their revelry and their reverie. But she’s a lost soul, too, an expat escaping the clutches of a domineering mother and family obligations, and her independence — the fact that she still has control over her life — makes her fascinating to them: the specimen they can’t help but stare at.
Chandler gives the film its spark. She’s ditzy and dear and given to fits of dramatics, but there’s something disturbingly sanguine about her. (When discovered, she’s holding a champagne glass containing a man’s false teeth, simply because he asked her to — and nothing will persuade her to abandon her post. We later discover she keeps turtles in her bathtub.) The fliers chaperone her, they banter with her, they even bunk with her, but as intimate as it gets — Johnny Mack Brown helps scrub her back — there’s no danger of anything inappropriate. They’ve given up pursuits of any kind. Their only mission now is one of constant inebriation — and the camaraderie that results. The veterans have developed verbal routines that amuse them; Chandler speaks in her own shorthand — steeped in logic only she understands — and sometimes the conversations seem like a string of non sequiturs that no one has the need or inclination to decipher.
But Chandler — for all the ways she fits with the foursome — is capable of letting down her guard, something the fliers find impossible to do. She asks Barthelmess — whose hands were severely burned in a crash — about Minnesota, where he grew up, and if he was happy there, and the most he’s willing to concede is “I think so.” The past is vague, tenuous, discomfiting. The vets feel disconnected from everything that’s come before; being near death is about the only thing that feels familiar — whether they’re haunting a graveyard or crashing a bullfight. An air of melancholy hangs over the film, but also one of inevitability; the fliers are heading down a dangerous path that they haven’t the clarity to see. That lack of clarity is something Dieterle had an aptitude for capturing on film. He empathized with his characters’ inability to fully understand the situation they’d found themselves in, and the damage they were inflicting — and he never judged them for rationalizing their own bad behavior. Here, the fliers are terrified of feeling something again — so they try to drink it away, and when that won’t do the trick, they run from it. (And in a sense, they’re right to run, because it’s Chandler’s sincerity — her incapacity not to care — that hastens their demise.) And so they remain trapped in a fever dream that only alcohol can cool and cleanse.
The Last Flight was hailed by critics (The New York Times found it “a brilliant study of the post-war psychology of four injured aviators”) and — upon its rediscovery in the ’70s — proclaimed a forgotten masterpiece. It showed what Dieterle was capable of; his next film wondered what he wasn’t capable of, and came away empty-handed. A simple viewing of HER MAJESTY, LOVE gives lie to the way historians have long characterized the films of Marilyn Miller. Miller was a top Broadway star whose time in Hollywood was short-lived (three films and out). Her first film was a fairly straightforward adaptation of her 1920 Broadway musical Sally, complete with members of the original company and road tour. It was a huge hit, and because it was a huge hit, authors a half century later — few of whom had actually had a chance to see the film — postured that it must have been wonderful. Her next film, an adaptation of her 1925 Broadway musical Sunny, proved far less potent at the box office, so it was deemed “not as good.” And because few theatre or film aficionados ever heard of (much less saw) Her Majesty, Love, and merely knew that it was her last film, they presumed that it was a turkey: conclusive proof that Miller’s talents didn’t translate to the screen.
Of course, now that we can see the three films, we know everything we’ve been taught is untrue. Sally, pretty much lifted from the Broadway stage, is a good example of a Twenties musical — but it’s a dreadful movie. It’s precious and mawkish and static. (And Miller’s every movement is so calculated, there doesn’t seem to be an ounce of spontaneity left in her.) Theatre mavens lavish praise on it for essentially filming the Broadway show intact, but its transfer to film only serves to reinforce why movie musicals became anathema in 1930 and ’31. With the coming of talkies, Broadway musicals were being optioned by the dozens, but they weren’t reimagined for the screen. Sally doing big box office doesn’t mean that Sally was good; Sally doing big box office and Miller’s next two films bombing means that the curiosity factor was high, but the film was a dud. You think if audiences thought Miller was all that in Sally, the tepid critical reviews for Sunny would have kept them away? They steered clear of Sunny because they feared having to sit through another Sally.
But Her Majesty, Love — her only original screen musical — discredits the notion that Miller didn’t have what it takes to be a movie star. For the first and only time, we understand what might have been. Dieterle gives her wit and a bite that are nowhere to be found in Sally or Sunny. He gives her a full-bloodedness that registers on camera. She’s broad across the shoulders; no longer a cloying innocent, she has toughness and vitality, and when she expresses her rage midway through by overturning a banquet table (her fiancé has thrown her over, so she overturns a table), the moment re-energizes both the film and her career. We suddenly get who she is — and how she’s unlike anyone on the silver screen. She’s the ingenue who overturns banquet tables. (Perhaps the reason Warners canceled her contract after this film is — oh, I don’t know — because she refused to keep sleeping with Jack Warner? We know more now than we did then.)
But as good as Miller is, it’s Dieterle who takes your breath away. His camera sweeps across ballrooms and pans across boardrooms: taking in each attendee, pausing just long enough to register their eccentricities. At one point, it takes a header out a window along with some cast-off flowers. Such technique was revolutionary in 1931, when cameras were so cumbersome (and noisy) that movement was held to a minimum. Everything Dieterle does in Her Majesty, Love is easy to take for granted now, but the critics noticed, and hailed him as a prodigy. In The New York Times, Mordaunt Hall credited him for the film’s success, declaring that Dieterle “wins top honors in Her Majesty, Love, a breezy little affair ….. Mr. Dieterle's direction of The Last Flight revealed him as a stylist, but here he accomplishes even greater wonders by his joyous manipulation of the camera.” Hall deemed his technique “astounding.”
The first scene alone is a dazzler, as Dieterle glides across a Berlin cabaret, tracking the festivities with precision masquerading as abandon — before coming to rest on the lady behind the bar, and the three elderly suitors making their pitch in song. There seem to be no limits to what Dieterle’s camera can do; it tilts, whirls and pivots. And there’s no limit to how many sounds he can capture at once, and cleanly — and in 1931, that was unheard of. (There’s one line from W.C. Fields that the microphone fails to pick up; it’s then, as you note the film’s only technical hiccup, that you become fully aware of the creative miracles Dieterle is managing. ) There are scenes of audio wizardry, as when band singer Donald Novis is serenading patrons with “Because of You,” and suddenly leading man Ben Lyon — who’s cajoled Miller to the dance floor — takes up the lyric himself, wooing her with it. Then back the lyric goes to Novis, so that Lyon and Miller can converse over it, then back to Lyon, to continue his seduction. This, mind you, at a time when sound and image were recorded simultaneously — as were dialogue and music — so that everything seen on the screen was heard on the soundtrack (and vice versa), requiring a complex scene like this to be shot in one unedited, pre-mixed take.
Dieterle seems as energized as Miller. When one scene ends, he fastens on a visual image that eases you into the next. Ball bearings in an office become bundt cakes at a banquet. Papers flying become pigeons flapping; broken dishes become solitaire cards. It’s a lightweight vehicle compared to The Last Flight, but Dieterle never condescends to it. The affection between Fields and Miller — as father and daughter — seems genuine; the love story between Miller and Lyon feels real; even the competitiveness between Lyon and his brother (Ford Sterling) convinces. The relationships feel uncommonly rich for a carefree musical of this period; Dieterle has an unerring instinct for tapping into the emotional core of a film. He’s very good with romance, too: a quality that will become one of his defining traits. For all of the script’s inadequacies — for all the key moments glossed over — Dieterle sees to it that you believe devoutly in Miller and Lyon, even after he betrays her to secure a promotion. Dieterle stresses Lyon’s misery over his error in judgment and Miller’s embarrassment at her overreaction (see “banquet table,” above); he convinces you of the pair’s deep longing for and commitment to each other, even when the screenwriters leave it unexpressed. And thus when the lovers ultimately reunite — in a tour-de-force of direction and design — you’re swept away on a cloud of bliss.
Warner Bros. threw Dieterle into six films in 1932. In an interview with Tom Flinn some forty years later, he recalled that when he started at the studio, “There were ten directors ahead of me ….. They had to make about 60 pictures a year in those days. All could not be top stories, that's obvious. There must be ‘B’ pictures. So naturally the newcomer gets the ‘B’ pictures.” Dieterle’s recollections seem in no way hyperbolic; of contract directors at Warners, certainly studio president Jack Warner’s future son-in-law Mervin Le Roy and production head Darryl Zanuck’s polo-playing buddy Michael Curtiz had seniority over Dieterle, but so did Raoul Walsh, Alfred E. Green, William Keighley, William Wellman, Roy Del Ruth, Lloyd Bacon, Alan Crosland and Archie Mayo. Most of the pictures he was assigned between 1932 and 1934 were programmers, even if they featured some of the studio’s biggest headliners; of the dozen films he directed for Warners during that three-year period, most came in under 70 minutes, and two under an hour. But several of them — in that first year, especially — were stupendous.
Take his next film, MAN WANTED. TCM summarizes the plot as “a female executive falls in love with her male secretary.” Most sites do. They‘ve got it backwards: Man Wanted is about a male secretary who falls in love with his (married) female boss. And it’s about how he handles it: the power dynamics, the sexual frustration (which he takes out, rather disturbingly, on his fiancée). Kay Francis had frequent tantrums on the set, accusing David Manners of trying to steal the film from her — but it’s his film to steal. Although Francis has the showier role — a Manhattan magazine editor who flirts with and even harasses her assistant (she’s trapped in an untraditional marriage and craves validation) — Manners’ secretary is the one who’s put through the wringer. There’s no more startling juxtaposition of images in Man Wanted than Manners’ train ride to and from Sag Harbor (where Francis has summoned him for work). On the ride there, we see him relaxed and reading a newspaper: ready to make his mark, or maybe his move. On the ride home, after stealing a kiss from his boss — and barely making an impression — he’s tightly coiled, his feet propped on the seat in front of him: radiating such self-loathing that, when a man contemplates sitting beside him, Manner’s manner drives him away. They’re brief scenes — maybe 10 seconds each, both wordless — and they may well have been added by Dieterle to deepen the character beats and improve the flow. (It’s the sort of thing he’d do often.) But they’re striking in their compactness: detailing Manners’ inner torment in quick, shrewd strokes.
Gregg Toland was the cinematographer, Anton Grot the art director; Warners gave Dieterle its A team, and he took full advantage. Francis’s office is a stunning study in Art Deco: the circular recessed bookshelves, the double-fluted sconces, the bronze and gold sculptures of the female form, of varying sizes — including an ivory figurine embedded in the facade of Francis’s desk. (In the opening scene, Francis’s husband admires her newly redecorated office, but Dieterle is careful not to let us see it yet. He unveils it upon Manners’ first visit, so we view it through his eyes.) The design offers insights into how the characters see the world — and themselves. The office seems an extension of Francis’s onscreen persona; Dieterle positions her perched among her possessions, her own curves complementing theirs. The spaces where her husband’s friends revel are almost aggressively spacious, as if their wealth and privilege know no bounds. But when Manners is in his drab apartment, torn up over his love for an unavailable woman, Toland and Dieterle blot out half the screen and frame him in a windowsill, lit by the lamps from the street below — illuminating his isolation.
It’s oddly fitting that for a film that works on so many levels, Grot’s sets are so often multi-tiered, and Toland’s camera makes the most of them: Francis appearing on the balcony of her second-floor bedroom to urge the partygoers below to let her sleep (“Would you play bridge or make love or something?”); a dance band — at a club where Manners takes fiancé Una Merkel to quench his thirst — that’s almost magically perched among the partygoers. There’s even a simulated crane shot that glides from a third-floor suite in the Sag Harbor hotel (where Francis and Manners are working late) out the balcony and down the facade of the building, until we reach the patio of a ground-floor ballroom — at which point the camera sweeps inside to join the festivities. Man Wanted is stylish and edgy — and groundbreaking. The pre-Code film that gets all the attention for gender bending is the Ruth Chatterton starrer Female (which Dieterle directed the first nine days of, before pulling out due to illness), with Chatterton also the head of a family business. Female suffers from a troubling second half, in which the leading lady’s epiphany about her priorities (all she desires is to be a dutiful wife) belies any feminist statement. Here, Francis remains in charge of her destiny: as impressive as any man who charts a course for his company — and as objectionable as any man who retaliates when his employees ask for personal time.
Man Wanted doesn’t get enough attention. Dieterle’s next film — also with Francis — gets too much. In JEWEL ROBBERY, set in Vienna, Francis is a bored Baron’s wife whose passion is reignited by jewel thief William Powell. (Warner Bros. scooped up this big Broadway flop for a measly $10,000.) It’s frivolous and decadent and licentious, and everything that lovers of pre-Code films hope for. It’s just not very good. Francis plays her wealthy adulteress alternately wide-eyed and bug-eyed: not a look that flatters her. The comic beats are strained, a lot of line readings (particularly between Francis and best pal Helen Vinson) are pushed, and a subplot involving marijuana takes up far too much space. Dieterle later admitted that he was only interested in it because of the chance to work with Powell; ironically, his reunion with Powell later that year, on LAWYER MAN, boasts the single worst script that Dieterle directed during his time in Hollywood — and not coincidentally, his worst work for Warners. It also contains the worst Powell performance I’ve seen. He’s a lawyer from a poor neighborhood who decides to pursue a job in a pricey D.A’s office — then runs afoul of the mob. The script forces Powell to switch gears so many times, he grows visibly frustrated; after a while, he seems to summon resolve by pushing his lines through his adenoids. And what can you make of a film where the key courtroom scene is left unscripted, glimpsed only by passersby in the hallway?
But sandwiched between Jewel Robbery and Lawyer Man come three fascinating — and largely forgotten — films. The first, the Ruth Chatterton starrer THE CRASH — from a script by staff writer Earl Baldwin — is exactly the kind of movie some pre-Code devotees can’t get a handle on: it’s not flamboyant or shocking or titillating. People don’t get away with saying the most outrageous things, or wearing the kind of flimsy attire that would have been banned two years later by the Hays Office; the characters don’t take pride in their own immorality, prompting you to cheer them on. It’s about a husband and wife who keep hurting each other year after year; it’s about a Manhattan marriage that’s grown sour. He doesn’t think she’ll stay with him unless he can provide — but the only way he knows to provide is to pimp her out to wealthy men for stock market tips. She hates the request, but approves the results — so she does as she’s told. The time she’s forced to spend with other men has left her bored and bitter; having to serve up his wife for the table scraps she can secure has left him jaded and jealous. They’ve both gotten what they wanted, but they’ve destroyed their marriage in the process.(“What’s the matter with us anyway?” he bemoans at one point: “Seems to me the more money we make, the more wretched we are.”) But they’re forced to reevaluate when she — bristling and bruised — gives him a phony stock tip during a crucial week in 1929, and they’re wiped out in the crash.
This unhealthy codependency between husband and wife is surprisingly adult, and in many ways The Crash is the unlikeliest of Chatterton vehicles. It eschews the melodramatics that had anchored so many of her previous films; Madame X and Anybody’s Woman it’s not. Like so much of Dieterle, it holds its passions in check, but makes them doubly emphatic by doing so. There are seductions and shady deals, rebuffs and recriminations. But there are no big altercations. No one even raises their voice. It’s part of what makes the film seem so modern now — it avoids the histrionics common to the era. And it’s what makes it endlessly rewatchable. At just 56 minutes, it plays like a short story by Maupassant or, a century later, by John Cheever, where the plot is merely a mechanism for character exploration — although Dieterle manages to make room for a surprising amount of plot. (His attention to detail is outrageous. When Chatterton escapes to Bermuda, fearful of facing the sale of her house, she meets and charms an Australian sheep herder at the hotel where she’s taken residence. The book he’s reading, which we only glimpse in one quick shot when he sets it down to talk to her? Antic Hay, Aldous Huxley’s exposé of the self-absorbed cultural elite.)
Chatterton’s Linda Gault thinks the world revolves around her, and that’s how Dieterle shoots it. She’s immersed in herself, and so is the film, and as a result, you get deeper into her character — and into her acting abilities — than in perhaps any Chatterton vehicle. She’s coy and calculating, proud and pouty and altogether irresistible. (She’s decked out in two dozen Orry-Kelly gowns and supported by a splendid cast: husband George Brent, Paul Cavanagh, Henry Kolker, Lois Wilson and Barbara Leonard.) You’re entertained by Linda’s obliviousness, by her gift for self-preservation, and by her sly knowledge of how to use her charm and appeal. By her ability to be at once self-mocking, reflective and flirtatious. Both her sad self-awareness and her eager obliviousness prove endearing. When a former friend comes to call early in the film, begging for money, Linda is confused: “But I thought everyone was doing well these days.” Yet she pulls out her checkbook without a second thought. Near the end of the film, when Linda has to take work in a department store and that same friend — who managed to escape poverty with the money Linda gave her — helps support her by becoming her best customer, Linda beams with relief, “I’m so glad that someone’s still rich.” To Linda, it’s not so important that her friend is happy; she’s simply comforted by the fact that there are still wealthy people in the world. Perhaps it gives her hope, or adheres to her notion of normality.
You’re taken, too, by aspects of Linda’s makeup that she herself is unaware of: in particular, a nagging feeling that she chose a path for herself once, but got sidetracked. Can she still reach her destination? Or is there a better road ahead? There are countless colors to Linda, and Dieterle captures them all. He knows when to go in for a close-up and let a realization ripple across Chatterton’s face. Or to hold on a close-up as her character switches tactics, almost instinctually. She’s the axis around whom everyone’s life spins, and the staging and camerawork turn that into a kind of visual poetry. The characters keep orbiting her, unconsciously, and so does the cinematographer, the virtuosic Ernest Haller; shots are so short yet so fluid that it’s not until you rewatch that you marvel at the care taken in the composition. There’s a memorable scene in Bermuda when Linda’s would-be suitor gets cold feet; it’s staged around a window, and shot from countless angles. At the point where the couple reach an impasse, Dieterle positions his camera outside and catches each of them through a different pane, a mullion separating them. It’s elegant and seemingly effortless, in Dieterle’s best style — and also sensationally effective. None of his contemporaries at Warner Bros. could have tackled this assignment in the way Dieterle did; he created a quiet classic.
As opposed to SCARLET DAWN, which makes some noise. At first glance, it’s like a Cliff Notes account of the Russian Revolution — and not even a decent Cliff Notes account. The events of 1917 and 1918 are condensed into a handful of headlines, which summarize events with almost perverse inaccuracy. (“Communists Stage Demonstration Despite Tzar’s Denial of Revolutionary Rumors,” proclaims one newspaper. The six months between the abdication of Nicholas II and the Bolshevik revolt are altogether ignored.) Dieterle reported late in life that this lavish historical film “might’ve helped me a lot,” but that he started filming with only 10 pages of script — and judging from what’s on the screen, additional pages trickled in a few at a time. (There are staggering gaps in the narrative.) But you never sense Dieterle’s frustration; he pours himself into the project like he’s been handed the richest of romantic epics.
Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is Nikita Krasnoff, a Russian aristocrat forced to flee to Constantinople; Nancy Carroll is his servant girl Tanyusha, who insists on making the journey with him; and Lilyan Tashman (in one of her final roles: she died just two years later, at age 37, of abdominal cancer) is Nikita’s former mistress Vera, who reappears late in the game to suggest how he can cash in on his name and family history. Some of the transitions — like the development of Nikita and Tanyusha’s relationship — are glossed over completely by scenarists Niven Busch and Erwin Gelsey. (Nikita spends the first half hour sexually harassing Tanyusha — to her repeated objections — but when he then suggests marriage, she giggles like a schoolgirl accepting an invitation to the prom.) But when Dieterle has nothing to work with, he calls upon his silent film training and improvises magnificently. He counteracts the inept headlines at the top with rousing newsreel footage of Russian troops — we even get a glimpse of Nicholas II himself — and as tensions rise, he splices in effective shots of the rioting populace. And when Nikita returns from military maneuvers in the opening reel, anticipating the indulgences to come, Dieterle — with no script pages to guide him — sets that debauchery up on the screen in the form of a bacchanal that seems racy even by pre-Code standards.
But still, throughout the first half hour, you sense Dieterle praying for a couple of pages that he can do more than disguise with directorial flair: where he can focus on something of substance. And he gets it once Nikita proposes to Tanyusha. As noted, there’s been no buildup, but Dieterle doesn’t need it. Nikita shows up with a wedding dress, and as Tanyusha tries it on behind the semi-sheer sheet that she’s erected to provide some privacy in their one-room flat (two years before Gable and Colbert did their own variation in It Happened One Night), Nikita munches on a candied apple. Until he can’t take the suspense — or hold off his hunger and enthusiasm — and joins her behind the sheet, where the two of them are illuminated just enough to make the moment both dreamlike and vibrantly sensual. In the church scene that follows, the priest informs them that they need two witnesses, and Nikita scours the streets in search of obliging citizens. (His energy and enthusiasm prove infectious.) The ceremony itself is showered in candlelight — the majestic cathedral serving as the most extravagant yet solemn of backdrops — and their wedding supper is both modest and moving; as they drink to their new lives, Nikita explains the origin of clinking glasses when you toast. Tanyusha listens lovingly, and you find yourself charmed — quite despite yourself — by this burgeoning romance.
It’s hard to imagine who in 1932 could’ve pulled off the role of Nikita like Fairbanks. His boyish charm offset his bravado. His aggressions always felt cheeky rather than dangerous. (The writers gift him one great line midway through, as he’s about to embark on a plan to swindle some American tourists, but wants to make certain they’re the sort of people worth his time and effort: “Morals don’t bother me so much, but taste is so important.”) 1932 was a very good year for Fairbanks, with the stirring Union Depot and the sly It’s Tough to Be Famous — plus the overrated but affable Love Is a Racket. Scarlet Dawn is often treated as the runt of the litter, but it’s an unfair label. Dieterle weaves a powerful magic, and the love story has unexpected staying power. And Carroll, with her porcelain-doll features, never lets Tanyusha become a doormat or dimwit; she’s eager and suggestible simply because her head hasn’t been cluttered with facts (see Love Letters, 1945). Dieterle understands the qualities needed to establish the pair as a viable couple — and one whose reconciliation in the final reel you root for. And even though that reunion occurs about 10 seconds before the end, he knows exactly what buttons to push along the way to make the moment not merely convincing, but satisfying. As the screenwriters imagine it, Nikita stops himself at the culmination of a long con — one that’s prompted him to abandon his wife — because he suddenly develops a conscience: a weak resolution at best. As Dieterle expands on it, Nikita follows up by hunting the streets of Constantinople for Tanyusha: banging on gates, rushing blindly through alleys — his commitment to finding her growing so ferocious, the police have to drag him off — and still he won’t be stilled. It’s a stirring sequence. Dieterle’s gift for illustrative storytelling made an effortless transition from silent films to talkies. (In his book Hollywood Directors, Jean-Pierre Coursodon argues that Dieterle’s expressive camera movements were partial compensation for his shaky grasp of English. I can’t disagree with his assertion, but it overlooks the fact that for Dieterle, expressive camerawork was more often than not tied to the workings of the human heart.)
In between The Crash and Scarlet Dawn, Dieterle accepted a free-lance assignment at Fox. As critic and historian Dave Kehr has noted, “Fox was known as the directors' studio. Directors got a lot of leeway there, a lot of freedom to make things they wanted to make, in the way they wanted to make them.” And indeed, in the three films that Dieterle did at Fox — 6 Hours to Live in 1932, Adorable and The Devil’s in Love in 1933 — his sense of liberation is palpable. 6 HOURS TO LIVE is an uncommon blend of continental romance (which suitor will Baroness Miriam Jordan choose: Warner Baxter or John Boles?), political intrigue (who tried to assassinate the sole holdout to a trade agreement? ) and horror (can a scientist really reanimate a human corpse?). The pacing is more deliberate than anything we’ve seen from Dieterle — at times almost languorous; at the 55-minute mark, when his bosses at Warner Bros. would have been instructing him to wrap it up, he sets Baxter — a politician who’s never connected with the constituents he’s sworn to serve — on a metaphysical journey: delving into issues of morality, the nature of existence, and the benefits of believing in a higher power. (He comes to realize that his idealism has denied him empathy; all the work he’s done on behalf of the people hasn’t given them the kind of hope they need.) It’s the first time since The Last Flight that you sense Dieterle engaged not merely by the filmic possibilities of a project, but by its humanistic outlook and political undertones. Whereas in his second film for Fox, the musical comedy ADORABLE, he’s back to doing what he can with the creakiest of material — but his newfound autonomy ignites his creativity. As rebellious princess Janet Gaynor and palace guard Henri Garat meet incognito and try to navigate affairs of the heart and marriages of state, Dieterle indulges in feats of showmanship that call to mind Rouben Mamoulian’s work on Love Me Tonight. Adorable may be the ’30s film musical that soars the most above an almost insistently undistinguished score — and Dieterle does most of the soaring. He and cinematographer John F. Seitz keep the camera constantly in motion: wading through endless rows of servants, ascending high above the palace’s circular staircase, swirling around the leads as they engage in an afternoon of skating. Dieterle serves up steady surprises — even, following a night of revelry, letting Gaynor’s shoes go on dancing long after she’s discarded them and climbed into bed, and allowing the bed itself to rock her to sleep. He sets us down in an enchanted kingdom and sees to it that the enchantment rarely wanes.
And THE DEVIL’S IN LOVE, the best of Dieterle’s three Fox films, is the sort of romantic melodrama he would excel at in the 1940’s. It’s a work of feverish beauty. Despite its initial setting at a French Legion post in Northern Africa, it’s not a war movie; instead, it’s an early example of a “man on the run.” It concerns an honorable doctor — set up for murder and forced to flee his military post — who takes refuge at a mission in a small port town. Victor Jory is top-billed for the first time — during that brief period where he was seen and used as a leading man — and his swagger and intensity are irresistible. Howard Eastabrook — who’d taken home an Oscar for 1931’s Cimarron — did the script, and Hal Mohr — whom Dieterle would later engage to rescue A Midsummer Night’s Dream — the cinematography. There are nods to Eisenstein (the lack of a spacial anchor in the courtroom, the movement of the camera and soldiers on the battlefield) and to von Sternberg (the interplay between light and shadow, the cabaret-brothel that feels like a seedier version of the one in Morocco). But homages aside, Dieterle makes the film uniquely his own.
The trial sequence near the top is a model of furioso editing and camerawork — all of it emphasizing how swiftly the wheels of injustice turn. Stark close-ups snap back to over-the-shoulder shots — then are wiped away. (We’re given no establishing shot, mirroring Jory’s disorientation.) While Jory is being grilled by the prosecutor, Dieterle inserts a low-angle shot of a triple-chinned tribunal member fanning himself impatiently, foreshadowing the verdict; when Jory turns to plead his case through his defense attorney, shadows of sentries parade behind him. (He’s convicted and incarcerated even before all the evidence is in.) And when the prosecutor seeks to malign Jory with some irrelevant incident from his past, Dieterle cuts to a shot of the wall above and behind Jory’s attorney. “Objection!”, he cries, standing and rising into the frame. Even the liveliest of lawyers aren’t fast enough to keep up with the pace of this kangaroo court.
The film maintains this level of fury until we shift to the next location, the town of Port Zamba, where Jory — having escaped his imprisonment — has taken shelter, and where Loretta Young is disembarking the boat that brought her in. Whereas the film up to this point has been blanketed in darkness, Young appears and lets the light in. (She finds herself surrounded by swarms of children thirsting for coins, and she happily obliges.) Young is quietly subversive, as she was in so many pre-Code films. She and Jory meet at the mission run by her uncle and fall in love; soon the madam who took in Jory when he first came to town arrives to stake her claim. “I’ll expect you tonight,” she informs him, seeing to it that Young is in earshot. But Young betrays neither jealousy nor shock nor outrage. She’d long suspected this handsome doctor had a mysterious past, and now it’s confirmed; it makes her all the more intrigued. All the characters are nicely shaded. C. Henry Gordon, as the weaselly chief of police, is more affable than you’d expect, yet easily distracted; Vivienne Osborne, as the madam who also runs a nightclub, is tough on her dancing girls, but in some ways, more of a softie than Young. And Young and Jory, though forever dressed in white, are no innocents. When she realizes she’s falling for Jory, she makes a point of kissing him before admitting to having a fiancé; when he tracks down the real murderer late in the film, he goes to sadistic lengths to coerce a confession.
As Jory sees the world, faces are forever obscured in shadow; even in the relative quietude of the mission, trellises and trees cast shifting patterns, disguising and confounding features. (When the cops start to close in, Dieterle floods the mission with such harsh front-lighting that it becomes a hotbed of danger and intrigue. Fire up a lamp and there’s no knowing who might be seated beside you, or lying in wait.) Only Young provides the sense of clarity Jory craves; around her, the world seems calm and clear again. Yet that presents its own dangers. When the pair sit listening to the music of a nearby caravan, the moon illuminating her hair throws the scene into soft focus; Jory is swept away on such a sea of euphoria, he’s tempted to reveal details of his past that must remain hidden. (The woman he craves poses perhaps the greatest threat to his safety.) Dieterle’s camera accentuates the agony of a hunted man, uncertain where to turn or whom to trust.
Although his trio of Fox films were triumphs, Dieterle mostly spent 1933 and 1934 plying his trade at Warner Bros. — and to diminishing returns. (The scripts he was assigned in 1934 were worse than the ones from 1932.) There were a few exceptions. GRAND SLAM — all but forgotten today — is about contract bridge (which was at the time consuming couples across the country), and everything about it seems both accurate and oversized. It’s a spoof on marriage, on unhealthy obsessions, on the mainstream media, on the vagaries of fame — and on sportscasting, of all things. It fixes a handful of satirical targets, and manages to hit them all — but it never suffers from that frantic feel emblematic of the Warner Bros. factory at its worst. The opening scene — set at an upscale Russian restaurant (the sort where the waiters provide the entertainment) — introduces the cast of characters in short, clever strokes, using fluid camera movement and sumptuous design to disguise the apparatus beneath; we waft from wealthy patrons engaging in murmurous chitchat to the wait staff (Paul Lukas among them) amusing themselves in the kitchen to Loretta Young eking out a living in the coatcheck area. In a style by now typical of Dieterle, he keeps our eye busy while our ear is taking in the necessities. (The next time exposition needs to be doled out, he plants us atop a double-decker bus.)
Lukas is Peter Stanislavsky, a wannabe novelist; Young is his pert fiancée Marcia. Peter knows nothing about bridge (which in 1933 is unacceptable); in fact, he finds the game preposterous. Marcia sets out to instruct him, but Peter proves a resistant pupil, leading off every round with a maximum bid of seven spades. But at a private bridge party at the restaurant, wealthy matron Helen Vinson insists he join them, to fill out a table, and when he opens with his customary bid and makes it, his strategy — which he dubs, with dismissiveness towards his patrons and their passion, The Stanislavsky System — fascinates the crowd. And quickly becomes a sensation. There are no rules to the Stanislavsky System — that’s the point; if there are no rules, then husbands and wives can’t fight with each other over improper bidding or play. Needless to say, such a revolutionary concept sweeps the nation. (A headline informs us that “the church is endorsing the Stanislavsky System of bridge because it upholds the sanctity of marriage.”) The script by Erwin Gelsey and David Boehm is a tidy one, understanding the rules of the game, and how to make comic use of terms like “vulnerable” and “dummy.” But it’s Dieterle who holds it all together, balancing the effete posturing of the more upscale players with the broad physical routines supplied by Marcia’s neighbors. (One is an acrobat who can only focus — and release tension — if he does flips between hands.)
Lukas and Young — an unlikely pairing — make a believably flawed couple. He’s condescending, she’s ambitious and manipulative. But they’re lovely. You see all the qualities that attract them to each other, and when they’re putting on an act as the country’s happiest couple, it doesn’t seem like an act at all. But over time, they fall prey to their own con; even in a game without rules, people want to win. Couples still seek validation from their spouses — and like other champion bridge players, Lukas and Young start to wither under the spotlight. The film culminates in a match between Stanislavsky and discredited bridge expert Cedric Van Dorn, and Dieterle pulls out all the stops. In the grand hotel where the match is being played — the bridge table roped off like a prizefighting ring — socialites gather on one side while an orchestra entertains on the other. And in the forefront, a commentator perches behind a booth, offering a play-by-play that’s highly subjective and frequently inaccurate. (The satire of attention-grabbing media is uncanny: they can’t just tell the story; they have to be the story.) As crowds throng outside the hotel, eying the bridge scores posted on the facade, the rest of the country is glued to their radios — and each bid or play is punctuated by shots of avid listeners: from school children to prostitutes, in restaurants and in laundromats. The whole world stops for this climactic match — literally stops. Grand Slam may never again register with the forcefulness it had in 1933, but for those of us who were indoctrinated into the world of bridge from the moment we were big enough to hold a hand of cards, the film is a diamond in the ruff.
FROM HEADQUARTERS (1933) is Dieterle’s best work in the “fast and tough” Warner Bros. style. It’s a murder mystery set and solved entirely at a police station, the perpetrator fingered through a combination of state-of-the-art forensic evidence, solid detective work, and the sharp eye of Lieutenant George Brent. Dieterle never lets the science get too dry nor the outbursts from witnesses and suspects grow too outrageous. There’s a fun fakeout with a photograph that you think is the crime scene, and another with an ominous shadow that turns out to be Hugh Herbert, just about the least ominous man in show business. Dieterle engages in frequent crosscutting between the police investigation and the medical examination; at times, he seems to be challenging the cameraman to keep up. (The ME who takes too much delight in carving up dead bodies — Edward Ellis — would be immortalized onscreen the following year as The Thin Man.) It’s the kind of film that every Warners director would’ve done well, but differently; Dieterle’s is a doozy. Whereas FOG OVER FRISCO is the standard murder mystery-cum-romp that every top Warners director would’ve done in pretty much the same way. It’s the kind of film where you’re supposed to be more impressed by how much plot is crammed into an hour than by the plot itself, and the sort where everything gets wiped off the screen so quickly that nothing stays with you. Dieterle’s work is full of nervy brilliance, but you’d be hard-pressed to make the case that it’s the best use of his time and talent. And THE FIREBIRD is yet another murder mystery — this one of the apartment-building variety, albeit with too few suspects. (We only get to know one set of tenants well.) Dieterle keeps it moving; there’s just no suspense — and no spark.
MADAME DU BARRY, a frivolous period piece, could have been one of the highlights of Dieterle’s early years in Hollywood: it’s lively, salty and handsomely appointed — and it boasts a host of bravura performances (chief among them, the unlikely-cast Dolores del Río as Madame Du Barry and Reginald Owen as her eager swain King Louis, plus an agreeable Victor Jory and an imperious Verree Teasdale). It’s the atypical film that manages to be both hard-boiled and soft-hearted when it comes to l’amour; when Du Barry — who has Louis in thrall — demands a sleigh ride in the middle of summer (or else she’ll withhold favors), his advisors loot all the sugar in the kingdom, creating a fructose fairyland in which he can whisk her away. But the film had the lousy luck to be shot prior to the adoption of the Production Code but released shortly after, and the Hays Office took a hatchet to it. So much of del Rio ended up on the cutting room floor, the second half is dominated by the sexual awakening of the King’s oafish heir — and it’s a comedown. You can enjoy the film as is, but it’s hard not to lament the sequences that are clearly missing. (See Magic Fire, two decades later.) FASHIONS OF 1934 starts with nice aggression between stars William Powell and Bette Davis (as a flimflam man and a clothes designer), but around the time they’re prepping for a Busby Berkeley salute to the ostrich feather, the whole thing gets a little moldy. And THE SECRET BRIDE, a dreary political thriller in which Barbara Stanwyck is dolled up like Kay Francis and wasted, is the worst of the bunch; it’s Dieterle’s final film of 1934 and an ominous sign of the future. Once Warners saw he could bring in their programmers with style and efficiency, they didn’t see a need to promote him to better material.
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM arrived in 1935 to revive Dieterle’s stalling career at Warner Bros. To understand it fully, we have to look past presumptions that have been made and perpetuated over time. Max Reinhardt was an Austrian stage director of international acclaim when he came to the States in 1934 to present a now-legendary production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hollywood Bowl. Warners producer Hal Wallis and Dieterle (who had been an actor in Reinhardt’s company in Berlin) convinced Jack Warner to film a version of Shakespeare’s classic with Reinhardt at the helm. (The studio hoped such a prestigious picture would enhance their reputation.) Because Reinhardt hadn’t been behind the camera in over 20 years (and those efforts had proven disastrous) — and spoke no English to boot — Dieterle offered to facilitate, and an understanding was reached: Reinhardt would oversee the production and coach the actors, and Dieterle would film the scenes. That’s what was intended, and scores of film historians for nearly a century have presumed that’s what occurred.
Except it didn’t. For all sorts of reasons — Reinhardt’s inability to understand screen acting, his unfamiliarity with current film-craft, nine days of shooting that he missed because of a breach-of-contract suit filed against him by a French film company — Dieterle took over. (Because Reinhardt was Warners’ ticket to respectability, they cagily gave him a co-director credit — ahead of Dieterle.) Reinhardt may have coached some of the actors, but it’s likely that most chose to ignore him, as he was instructing them to perform at the top of their lungs, gesticulating wildly. (James Cagney, as Bottom, spoke candidly about disregarding Reinhardt.) In 1998, Mickey Rooney was asked what it was like to have to answer to two directors. He gave a quizzical look, as it the question made no sense, and responded, “I only had one director: Mr. Dieterle." Dieterle ended up directing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, plain and simple. Reinhardt's continued, reduced participation became an inconvenience that had to be tolerated, and Reinhardt — realizing that Warners wanted him for his name and not his input — found ways of sticking it to the studio, holding up production for hours on end by demanding some immaterial prop he knew was impossible to find.
Dieterle was charged with bringing both artistry and practicality to the proceedings; he had to be both problem-solver and visionary. When the forest that Reinhardt had imagined proved unfilmable (he had insisted trees — thick with real leaves — be constructed to the top of the soundstage, leaving no room for the lights), Dieterle enlisted the aid of Fox cinematographer Hal Mohr, and the pair sorted it in record time. Mohr thinned out the trees, sprayed the remaining ones with orange aluminum paint and coated them with tiny reflective metal particles, giving the forest the spacious yet eerie glow of a fairy tale. (He ultimately became the first — and only — write-in winner of an Academy Award.) When Reinhardt saddled him with a series of ballets by Russian-born choreographer Branislava Nijinska and Danish designer Max Rée, Dieterle honored the dances while deconstructing them, choosing arresting camera angles and diffusion filters that sustained visual interest — plus shrewd cutaways that kept them from feeling unrelated to the rest of the film. In what would be the play’s Act IV, when Oberon awakens Titania and entreats the various creatures to scatter, Dieterle uses Victor Jory’s flowing black cape as both wipe and reveal. As Jory strides off on his steed, his servants appear from behind his diaphanous cape. As they corral the fairies, one proves resistant, and a servant lifts her onto his shoulder as her hands flutter above her. As Nijinska stages it, he merely walks her upstage, but as Dieterle reimagines it for the screen (irising out on her hands, then layering the image onto a celestial matte painting), it looks like she’s rising into — and being swallowed by — the starry night.
When Reinhardt and Wallis came to blows over Anita Louise’s performance (Reinhardt wanted her to recite Titania’s lines in a singsong, while Wallis demanded more traditional line readings), Dieterle split the difference, effecting an ethereal quality that balanced Jory’s brooding benevolence. When 14-year-old Mickey Rooney — as Puck — broke his leg during filming, Dieterle had him wheeled around on a bicycle while nestled behind bushes — and for long shots, doubled by George P. Breakston. Watching, you’d never suspect there was a stand-in; as Scott MacQueen illustrates in his 2009 essay Midsummer Dream, Midwinter Nightmare, “Perhaps the cleverest example of Dieterle's resourcefulness is a continuous take that has ‘Breakston-Puck’ race into frame, making hand gestures to Olivia de Havilland to follow him. After ‘Breakston-Puck’ has left frame, the camera pans with de Havilland to reveal ‘Rooney-Puck’ already planted in the glade, repeating the same hand gestures to her. The audience's attention is so well directed that the substitution of players is never apparent.” (Dieterle not only generated scenes around Rooney’s restrictions, but through them. Rooney on a roller board, clinging to the ladies' skirts as they drag him through the foggy forest, is one of the movie’s best-remembered bits — and it was designed to bypass his immobility.)
The resulting film is both maddening and mesmerizing, equal parts demented and delirious. It somehow manages to tame the loftiest pretensions of high art and showcase the shrewdest conventions of low comedy — then not merely merge them, but merge them into something that at times approaches the miraculous. A lot of critics loathed it, but in The New York Times, Andre Sennwald captured the qualities that have made it endure: “The work is rich in aspiration and the sum of its faults is dwarfed against the sheer bulk of the enterprise. If this is no masterpiece, it is a brave and beautiful effort to subdue the most difficult of Shakespeare's works. It has its fun and its haunted beauty.”
Despite the sizable investment, Warners turned a profit and secured the desired Oscar nominations (including Best Picture) to boost their standing. That said, audiences would have to wait six years to see Dieterle apply his magic to a fantasy over which he had full artistic control — but in the meantime, the film showed the studio what he was capable of. Jack Warner dangled his next prestige pic, Anthony Adverse, under Dieterle’s nose before giving it to his new son-in-law Mervin LeRoy. Instead, he awarded Dieterle something distinctly inferior. (As Dieterle later recalled, “At Warners the moment you had a success, they gave you something terrible to keep you from getting a swelled head. They would force you to do a lousy story as a routine method of keeping you in line.”) But that lousy story — DR. SOCRATES with Paul Muni (filmed with efficiency by Dieterle, but second-rate nonetheless) — changed the trajectory of his career, when he showed Muni the outline of a script in development about Louis Pasteur, then he and Muni told Warners they’d make Dr. Socrates if they could follow it up with the Pasteur project.
The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) proved such a resounding success (taking home Oscars for Best Actor, Best Story, and Best Original Screenplay — plus a nod for Best Picture — and further cementing Warners’ status) that Dieterle was handed five more high-profile biopics over the next four years. And through these films — most of them major hits — he established himself, as Flinn puts it, as “the quintessential ‘liberal’ director of the ’30s: his films championed the liberal, democratic, enlightened tradition.” The underlying message — the value of progress (and not just scientific progress, but freedom, fairness and equality) — seems tame today, and we can never again view these films with the fresh eyes that viewers brought to them at the time. The Warners biopics were as uncommon and as invigorating to Depression-era audiences as the screwballs; they assured them that whatever adversities they might face — whatever adversities their ancestors had faced — life unfailingly marches toward the betterment of humankind.
Abandoning chronology, I’m going to make my way through Dieterle’s biopics in short(er) strokes. They all have their good points, yet they don’t hold up as well as his early ’30s work or his ’40s melodramas. Although they reveal a lot about Dieterle’s personal convictions — and have to be considered among the strongest reasons he was gray listed in the ’50s — they don’t reveal as much about him as an artist. But at the time, he was considered a director at the top of his game, at the top of his field. (Reviewing Louis Pasteur, The New York Times’ film critic Frank Nugent hailed Dieterle’s “gifted direction”; he dubbed his work on The Life of Emile Zola “majestic” and his work on Dr. Erhlich’s Magic Bullet “faultless.”)
There weren’t a lot of templates for the writers of THE STORY OF LOUIS PASTEUR. Biopics — in this country, at least — were few and far between: Alexander Hamilton in 1931, Queen Christina in 1933, Cleopatra in 1934, Annie Oakley in 1935 — am I forgetting any? And the problem with The Story of Louis Pasteur is that the writers don’t trust the narrative. There were no examples of screen biographies about medical innovation — would audiences find it interesting? So screenwriters Sheridan Gibley and Pierre Collings throw in a lot of traditional elements to ensure that the story is familiar and appealing — including a romance between Pasteur’s daughter and a young doctor who comes to work for him. To the writers’ credit, Pasteur is well characterized. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly — but he has a whole lot of fools to suffer. Of course, they weren’t considered fools in the mid-19th century, before it was commonly understood that microbes cause disease — but still, their obstinacy proves wearying. People keep turning on Pasteur for no good reason, except that in the minds of the screenwriters, it heightens the conflict and raises the stakes. Even Napoleon III — whose own wife has praised Pasteur’s findings — sees fit not merely to disavow his work, but to banish him from Paris. (Pasteur is both cast off and put on display, like the main attraction at a carnival show. At one point, the writers toss in an actual carnival show, complete with acrobats: “Come see if Pasteur can save a flock of sheep from succumbing to anthrax!”) And all that said, Muni is so appealing — such a stubborn curmudgeon, cursed with being right about pretty much everything — and Dieterle is so adept at weaving together the stylistic strands that the film entertains even at its most irritating.
But by the time Warners greenlighted its next biopic about scientific progress — DR. EHRLICH’S MAGIC BULLET, four years later — the studio realized they didn’t need to coddle their audience. Romantic subplots were expendable; the creation of an “arch-nemesis” was unnecessary. The challenges inherent in scientific advancement were enough. And the new assurance led to a tonal change. Whereas Pasteur is infused with hope, Dr. Ehrlich — a vehicle for Edward G. Robinson — is tinged with irony. At the start of Pasteur, patients are dying, and only Pasteur understands why; at the top of Dr. Ehrlich, a patient is assured a treatment for syphilis will cure him, even though the attending physician knows full well that it won’t. And the attending physician is Dr. Paul Ehrlich himself. He’s part of an establishment given to lying about its limitations. Pasteur sets its lead character, a chemist, apart from the medical community: the white knight who swoops in and saves the day. Ehrlich is no superhero; he’s susceptible to the same diseases and disillusions that plague his patients, and over time, they prove his undoing. Oh, the film tugs at a lot of the same heartstrings as its predecessor. Pasteur saves a boy sick with rabies; Ehrlich heals a whole hospital of children stricken with diphtheria. But Dieterle places the focus where it should be: allowing us to see the cures through the eyes of the patients. There are contrivances that the film is too good for, as when Ehrlich’s wife turns up the heat in his lab and — eureka! — ignites a breakthrough in his research. But mostly, Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet is content to put the science first, wondering: when is the right time to make a vaccine available? How many clinical trials should be done while people are dying? It’s not just about the joy of saving lives, but about the risks of saving them; as such, it taps into a rich set of emotional beats that suit Dieterle well. (The script by Norman Burnstine and Heinz Herald — with rewrites by John Huston — went on to be Oscar nominated.)
The film that followed Ehrlich, A DISPATCH FROM REUTERS (also with Robinson), is another biopic about an idealistic rebel taking on the establishment — here, Julius Reuter, whose efforts to speedily transmit information led to the creation of an international news service; it’s also, like Ehrlich, about the challenges of funding innovation. But the subject matter lifts it out of the laboratory and sets it in the sun, and Dieterle and cinematographer James Wong Howe take full advantage, letting the film soar in a way that the others don’t. One of the first set-pieces is a race against time to save a child: a stagecoach has been dispatched to a hospital carrying improper medication, a rider on horseback is sent to stop the stagecoach, and Reuter releases a carrier pigeon to outrun the rider. It sets the tone for a story that — like the pioneer at its heart — refuses to come up for air. Eddie Albert is a drag as Reuter’s lazy friend and assistant, but Robinson’s Reuter is canny and cunning and relentless. Reuters is scrappier than the other bios, but it’s also brasher and livelier; it’s a fine trade-off. It’s sometimes overlooked in a discussion of Dieterle biopics — but not nearly as much as THE WHITE ANGEL, a Kay Francis starrer about Florence Nightingale that flopped in 1936 and was promptly forgotten. Critics and audiences couldn’t understand how an actress who had carved a career out of playing a clothes horse could expect to be taken seriously as such a plain, austere woman. Ironically, the fact that Francis’s name has faded into obscurity works to the film’s advantage; now that we don’t bring preconceptions to the screen, we can see what a wonderful vehicle it is for her: one she tackles with commitment and vigor. It’s a transformation not unlike the ones Muni underwent in Louis Pasteur and Robinson in Dr. Ehrlich. Audiences applauded them for their boldness and versatility, while Francis was crucified for daring to do something different — for stepping out of line, as it were.
Francis is surrounded by a fine supporting cast: Ian Hunter as the reporter who understands Nightingale’s work and Donald Woods as the suitor who doesn’t; Henry O’Neill as the doctor desperate to support her and Donald Crisp as the one determined take her down. The film isn’t subtle about the challenges Nightingale faced, but misogyny isn’t subtle. (Witness the way the movie was received.) There are a few underwritten scenes, and some transitions that are plain awful. (There are way too many intertitles, for one thing.) But most of what’s there is highly watchable. When Nightingale arrives in Scutari to assume her post at a military hospital and sees the pain, degradation and squalor that the soldiers have been forced to endure, Francis bites down hard on her lip, her horror mixed with anger and resolve. And Dieterle sits on that shot for 15 or 20 seconds. She knows just what to do with the moment, and he knows enough to let her. (Nightingale doesn’t bite her lip all that often; she’s unable to suppress the occasional dig at her chauvinistic superior officer, even though she knows it’s not to her advantage.) Yet there are times when Dieterle transforms the setting into one of almost inviolate beauty. When Nightingale makes her way through the wards at night — checking on each patient, illuminated only by a lantern — and a bandaged man whose eyes are barely visible salutes her, Dieterle taps into a humanity that eludes some of his drier biopics. At moments like this, Francis truly becomes the nurse we dream of having at our side, when our bodies and souls are in need of healing.
Sometimes Hollywood gets it wrong when it comes to history (e.g., The White Angel, which — even as you enjoy it — you recognize as largely a work of fiction); sometimes history gets it wrong when it comes to Hollywood. History has proclaimed 1939’s JUAREZ a misfire; in truth, it’s the best of Dieterle’s biopics. It presents a more multi-layered look at “progress” than Pasteur or Ehrlich, and a far more ambivalent portrait of its title character. It’s the biopic for those who weren’t crazy about Pasteur and Zola; since critics had showered praise on those (fairly shallow) films, it stands to reason they viewed Juarez as a failure.
Juarez — which charts the struggle for the soul of the Mexican people between rebel leader Benito Juarez and newly-installed Emperor Maximilian von Habsburg — doesn’t just deconstruct the Warners biopic formula. It blows it to bits. Dieterle stubbornly refuses to streamline its story into a tale of good vs. evil; although there are two warring factions, he declines to imbue one with a clearer sense of virtue. It’s fitting that it’s Brian Aherne as Maximilian who snared the film’s sole acting nod; he’s the one who garners our sympathy. As Dieterle shoots it, Juarez is a film about delusion — the romance of delusion, you might say — and Maximilian (duped by Napoleon into accepting the title of emperor through a phony plebiscite) is the face of it. Aherne’s Maximilian is proud but kind, soft-spoken and trusting, magnanimous yet misinformed. Eager to care for his people, he supports land reforms and religious freedom. He rules with a sort of paternal benevolence, and at times, he’s so adaptable and Juarez (by comparison) so unyielding that it’s difficult to say which of them wields the moral compass. (It’s possible to believe the peasants who support Juarez are being duped by a power-hungry narcissist.) Muni plays Juarez as more stubborn than single-minded, more manipulative than inspiring. He doesn’t try to paint a saintly portrait; he paints a credible and useful one. Muni’s performance is at once ostentatious and self-effacing; it’s wildly underrated. He gives himself over to the role — both in makeup and manner — till he’s all but unrecognizable. But he doesn’t try to play the hero. John Huston, one of the credited writers, complained that Muni added dialogue during filming to augment his role. (Bette Davis, who played the Empress Carlota, claimed it was a full 80 pages. And I’m the Queen of England.) But the proportions as they stand now are perfect. With any less camera time, there would be too little Juarez, and the essential conflict between two self-respecting men — each of them satisfied that their political ideology best serves the people — would never ignite.
Juarez poses challenging ethical questions — the kind its audience wasn’t prepared to ponder. It had come to the movies to celebrate the virtues of democracy. But Maximilian’s flexibility — and at times his reasoning — are inescapably appealing. When he learns of Napoleon’s deception and proposes instead a constitutional monarchy, with himself as Emperor and Juarez as Prime Minister, and Juarez rejects the notion out of hand — insisting that nothing is a substitute for representational democracy and, in fact, shaming the messenger who brought what he thought was an admirable compromise — it’s easy to wonder if a golden opportunity hasn’t somehow been missed. The screenplay tries to depict Juarez as the savior of democracy, but Dieterle refuses to condescend to his audience. If they’re not aware of Mexico’s complex political history, they should be — or at the very least, they should understand that Juarez’s legacy didn’t last long. The script obviously doesn’t reference the decades of double-dealing that followed Juarez’s presidency — Porfirio Díaz’s de facto dictatorship, the PRI’s control of power for 70 years — but Dieterle gives such weight to the power struggle between Juarez and his (fictional) vice president (the formidable Joseph Calleia), he reminds us that one of the dangers of representative government lies in its capacity to enable and reward the corrupt. While in no way denigrating democracy, Dieterle asks us to consider how hard it is to achieve — and how much harder to maintain. (Needless to say, the film has grown increasingly relevant over the last decade. See also The Searching Wind.) Dieterle was no doubt guided by his memory of how Germany’s constitutional monarchy was replaced by a parliamentary democracy in 1918, and how the next fifteen years were marked by economic hardship — and where it all led. Dieterle, devoutly anti-fascist, nonetheless muddies the political waters in a way that Warners never intended; instead, he forges a biopic with all the depth and power of his best work.
And then there’s THE LIFE OF EMILE ZOLA (1937), which — despite the critical huzzahs, despite the then-record 10 Academy Award nominations — is the weakest of the lot. The opening consists of as random an assortment of scenes as ever burdened a bio. It feels like you’re flying through Zola‘s life, because that’s exactly what you’re doing. The screenwriters give themselves just 20 minutes to elevate the wannabe author with his insatiable outrage from poverty to celebrity, then just 8 minutes more to age him into an elderly novelist resting on his laurels: taken to showing off the bric-a-brac he’s imported from abroad. (We accomplish the passage of time through a montage of books he’s authored, most of which mean nothing to us.) Oh, and he has a falling out with his best friend Cézanne, who condemns him for managing to lose his insatiable outrage in just 28 minutes.
And with the life of Emile Zola — the very title of the movie — established in some of the worst onscreen shorthand you’ve ever seen, we cut to the focus of the film: the wrongful charges of treason leveled at Jewish artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus. Following a scene in which Dreyfus is framed in record time, officers raid his home, prompting his wife to declare, “My husband is innocent!” — at which point we cut to a newsboy holding up a paper with the headline “Dreyfus Found Guilty.” 48 minutes in, and we’re still scripting in shorthand. Soon after, Zola hears the court case referenced and declares, “Dreyfus, Dreyfus, Dreyfus! Must we be eternally plagued by that name?” — an overreaction at best. But he doesn’t give it another thought; relaxing at home, he informs his wife he’s so content that “there’s nothing more for me to desire.” And then there’s a knock at the door. 58 minutes in, and we’re still scripting in shorthand. And trite shorthand, at that.
Finally, 67 minutes in, Zola — convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence and his sense of outrage restored — gives a libelous speech in which he recaps everything that’s happened up to that point — and the movie gets underway. (The Life of Emile Zola took home the Oscar for “Best Writing, Screenplay”; in hindsight, that can be seen as a miscarriage of justice second only to the Dreyfus Affair itself.) The film gets better for actually getting started, but issues remain. As Dreyfus’s wife, Gale Sondergaard has a penchant for the sort of melodramatic masochism that Dieterle had trouble taming (see also Miriam Jordan in 6 Hours to Live and Verree Teasdale in Firebird); as Zola’s wife, Gloria Holden barely registers. And Muni serves up a fussy, mannered and overly emphatic performance that betrays all the thought that went into it. Acting honors go to Donald Crisp as Zola’s lawyer, to Henry O’Neill as the only man in the army with a conscience, and to Best Supporting Actor Joseph Schildkraut as Dreyfus (although there’s not enough of him, and perhaps after he’s imprisoned on Devil’s Island and we have to sit through that hoary device of the years scrolling by onscreen to indicate the length of his incarceration, writers Norman Reilly Raine and Heinz Herald could reward him with better lines than “I am innocent! I am innocent! I am innocent! I am innocent!”).
As for Dieterle, his work is handsome and proficient — but oddly muted. Oh, he has his triumphs, both big and small. At the start, we’re introduced to Zola in the humble Parisian garret he shares with Cézanne; the room is unusually well-lit — both for a Warners pic and for a Dieterle pic. Then Zola makes an excursion into a seedier section of town, where a woman has thrown herself into the Seine to avoid the misery of starvation; shadows black out all but the essentials, sad and hungry faces poke out from the darkness, and you feel like you’re watching a Warner Bros. film again. Even at the start, when Zola is at his most impoverished, Dieterle takes visual pains to show him one step removed from the country’s greatest crimes and injustices. He chronicles them, but never experiences them. And so his ultimate isolation, once he’s achieved a level of fame and wealth, doesn’t feel like a story rebooting itself or switching gears; Zola’s level of empathy was never matched by his level of poverty. (In a move that seems both wise and a little wicked, his home when he’s living his best life has the bright, even, high-key lighting and opulent look of an MGM set. He’s as far from his roots as, say, Warners is from Metro.) This is the kind of artistry at which Dieterle excelled. Shots don’t merely advance the narrative, but capture and clarify its themes. (The film’s most moving moment comes when Dreyfus, upon learning of his acquittal, exits his prison cell, then turns around and walks back in — an action he repeats several times, as if the mere steps he’s taking can’t match the enormity of the moment. Like David Manners’ twin train rides in Man Wanted and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. scouring the streets in Scarlet Dawn, it’s clearly Dieterle’s own creation: a tribute to his ability to capture in silence all that the script has been unable to convey in prose.)
But still: during the film’s patchy first hour, there are transitions that seem decidedly beneath Dieterle; at one point, after Zola and his wife converse in front of the fire, Dieterle pulls back behind the fire before cutting away: the sort of filmic cliché that went out with the nickelodeons. He had turned transitions into an art form in his second Hollywood film; he was adept at salvaging skeletal scripts. So why does he seem reluctant to put his full talents to use here? Dieterle reported late in life that Emile Zola was his favorite of his biopics. Great artists are often faulty in pinpointing their best work — and so it is with Dieterle. He no doubt was delighted to be able to take a stance against anti-Semitism — to lay bare the mistreatment of his own people throughout history — and the success of the film made him feel that his outrage was shared by moviegoers. But he couldn’t see that his reverence toward the title character and the subject matter made him play it far too safe in the interests of being earnest. (The movie so deifies Zola that when he’s being memorialized in the final scene, his casket on full display, two large beams of sunlight appear and illuminate his coffin. If that’s all I knew of Dieterle’s work, I’d kind of hate him.) The whole film is like that; it’s possible to sit through the solemnity of Emile Zola, then cast your mind back to the “throw it against the wall” absurdities of Louis Pasteur and think, “I miss the acrobats.” Dieterle’s sense of worship mutes his gifts. He seems afraid to comment on — much less correct — the screenplay, for fear of imposing himself on the story. That makes Zola his rare impersonal work, and an impersonal William Dieterle is almost a contradiction in terms. (Ironically, it proved his sole Academy Award nomination for Best Director.)
In between The White Angel and The Life of Emile Zola, Warners put Dieterle to work on three other films. THE GREAT O’MALLEY takes a preposterous premise — a cop who adheres so closely to the letter of the law that he tickets his own mother for littering (“You need heart, O’Malley,” his sergeant advises him: “You need something in your vein besides city ordinances”) — and expands it into a heartwarming film. (The script is from staff writer Milton Krims, who’d also do Reuters.) SATAN MET A LADY, Warner’ tongue-in-cheek treatment of their 1931 Maltese Falcon (which of course they’d remake again in 1941), is the oddball film that comes to life every time its leading lady leaves the screen. Everyone in the cast understands the film’s smirking, self-aware tone — everyone, that is, except top-billed Bette Davis. Davis could wisecrack with the best of them, but she wasn’t known for her comic prowess, and she doesn’t try to stretch herself here. She makes striking entrances and furioso exits — but has no idea what to do in between; she comes off like the spoiled child who refuses to come out to play. But the film works even without her; both The Great O’Malley and Satan Met a Lady are films I haven’t been prompted to revisit, but I wouldn’t mind.
But ANOTHER DAWN is worth more serious discussion, because — like Scarlet Dawn and The Devil’s in Love — it anticipates the romantic melodramas that would become Dieterle’s stock-in-trade by the mid-’40s: Love Letters, Portrait of Jennie, The Accused. Another Dawn isn’t as good as those, but its desert landscape (an army post in Dubik) casts a spell; Dieterle embraces themes and stylistic conventions that we now think of as noir. Here, Kay Francis (in her fourth and final film with Dieterle) settles for marrying a colonel she doesn’t love (Ian Hunter), while pining for the younger captain (Errol Flynn) who reminds her of her late fiancé. Francis was exhausted at the start of filming, and no sooner had shooting commenced than she requested two months off to recuperate. You can tell which scenes were filmed before her vacation, but she uses her fatigue to her advantage; at her most frail, she makes it clear that the rigors of loving a man who died have taken their toll on her. And once she’s fully rested, she’s glorious; decked out once more in her customary Orry-Kelly gowns, she’s exactly the kind of glamour goddess that two men would fall for. Hunter is a sturdy enough actor to transcend the role of cuckold, and Flynn — as Hunter’s adjutant — captures all the distress and desire raging within. The dialogue gets pretty flowery at times — but that’s the sort of thing Dieterle was masterful at maneuvering. Near the end, Francis turns up in Flynn’s quarters and announces her plans to leave because she can’t go on “loving you, respecting him, hating myself.” She’s draped in a severe black dress with a soft white ruffled collar (she identifies as both perpetrator and victim), and Dieterle backs her against open shutters that signal her sense of imprisonment. Her eyes well up with tears, and a potentially hokey moment grows somehow transcendent.
Dieterle creates an atmosphere charged with unexpressed longing — one seemingly at odds with the regimented routine of army life. By day, the steady sway of the palm trees grows almost dizzying; at night, the moon streams through the shutters of the officers’ quarters, casting bars across the characters’ faces: heightening their feelings of futility. It’s not a setting conducive to sanity. Even the sandstorms — and there’s a doozy near the end — conspire against the characters: the natives describe them as “winds of madness.” Hell, even the military operations provide no relief: as Flynn leads his men on a mission, their horses sinking into the thick desert dunes, Dieterle and cinematographer Tony Gaudio set them upon mountains of sand so high that they practically brush up against the sun — like Icarus on the brink of his own doom. In Dubik, it’s impossible to outrun your obsessions. There are a host of smart lines in scenarist Laird Doyle’s script — loosely based on a play by Somerset Maugham — as well as scattered absurdities. (The officers live in such soundproof quarters that they’re unaware of the sandstorms raging beyond their walls.) At the end of the day, you have no idea if the movie will punish Francis and Flynn for their initial indiscretions or reward them for their subsequent self-sacrifice, and that suspense heightens the final scenes. You hope that true love will prevail — but under these circumstances, from such beginnings, does it ever?
Shortly after completing Zola, Dieterle freelanced for producer Walter Wanger on BLOCKADE (1938), one of the few Hollywood films to take on the Spanish Civil War. Zola was hailed by critics and audiences, and today feels staid and overrated. Blockade was pretty much rejected by all, but its championing of the common people against oppressive forces allows Dieterle full access to his outrage — and for all its faults, it packs a punch. In fact, I’ll take it one step further. Blockade — one of his most overlooked and maligned works — is the start of Dieterle’s greatest period: 15 consecutive films that he pours himself into with such intelligence, instinct, finesse and élan that he — as Mordaunt Hall predicted — “[makes] a poor story interesting and a good story a masterpiece.” There are a lot of good stories scattered among these 15 films.
Blockade is often attacked because of the limitations the Hays Office — and timid studio executives — imposed on it. Unwilling to court controversy, they insisted the specifics of the war be omitted altogether; the Loyalists and Nationalists couldn’t even be named. Detractors claim that it’s impossible to discern something as simple as which side star Henry Fonda is fighting on — so the movie pretty much exists in a vacuum. Nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone who had read a newspaper in 1938 — or seen The March of Time — would readily understand that Fonda was not fighting on the side supported by Nazi Germany; studio heads then were determined to remain impartial amidst the rising tensions in Europe (Louis B. Mayer bent over backwards to appease Hitler), but its Oscar-nominated script by John Howard Lawson — later blacklisted as one of the Hollywood Ten — is clearly preaching anti-Fascist politics.
But even less informed audiences would’ve understood Lawson’s central message. His screenplay takes its cue from the bombing of Guernica, a town in northern Spain, in April of 1937; German pilots had left military targets untouched and aimed their explosives into the center of town, slaughtering 1000 civilians. Lawson (with uncredited assists from James M. Cain and Clifford Odets) pens an impassioned condemnation of the tactical bombing of private citizens, which would in fact become a chief military strategy during World War II. (Today, with civilians accounting for 90% of wartime casualties, the film feels timelier than ever.) When nearby bombing raids threaten the town where Fonda has his farm, prompting his neighbors to abandon their homes, he pleads with them naïvely, “Stop! Turn back! You may escape with your lives, but you won’t have anything to live for!” He doesn’t yet appreciate the ruthlessness of the enemy, or the changing face of modern warfare. But Fonda’s speech is subordinated to Dieterle’s visuals, which tell the real story: peasants making their way knee-deep through streams, their belongings stacked on their arched spines, their faces numb with terror as they try to outrun sounds that — mere days ago — they would have mistaken for thunder. And you understand intuitively that they’ll never hear thunder the same way again. (Every civilian assault is accompanied by an indelible image: a shelled apartment house collapsing around a baby in its crib; starving villagers anxiously awaiting a supply ship, only to see it torpedoed.) Lawson and Dieterle cry out for a humanitarian response that wouldn’t come for over a decade, until the Geneva Conventions branded the indiscriminate slaughter of private citizens a war crime.
The film takes about a half hour to get its bearings. The opening with Henry Fonda, happy farmer, is a bit precious, and the introduction of costar Madeleine Carroll amounts to a meet-cute. Fonda’s indoctrination into the military feels rushed, and his resulting standoff with Carroll is one of those awful “it’s not what you think it is” miscommunications that could be cleared up in about two sentences. But once a bomb strikes the building where she’s been brought in for questioning, and the two of them are trapped underground — and he masterminds an escape, but she manages to escape from him — the pieces fall into place, and it becomes so much richer than the “espionage thriller” it’s typically tagged as. It doesn’t all work — and it’s hard to know what to make of Fonda’s performance; most of the time, he hits all the right notes, but occasionally — including his fourth wall-breaking final speech — he seems to succumb to an unnerving case of overacting that he mistakes for intensity. But the things that do work are due mostly to Dieterle. He manages to merge social commentary, suspense, military strategy, mystery, romance and even a touch of humor — as well as to fold in supporting turns by John Halliday and Reginald Denny that could’ve come off as too sinister and too obtuse, respectively, but don’t. Blockade is a devoutly personal film that you sense no director would have taken on or pulled off quite like Dieterle — and after the listlessness of Zola, that’s a relief.
With Dieterle very much in demand (he had just won Warner Bros. its first Best Picture statue, after all), RKO soon came beckoning. George Schaefer took over as president of RKO in 1938, and the next four years — artistically speaking, at least — were the studio’s glory years. Schaefer lavished films with such large budgets that they rarely turned a profit, but critics and audiences adored them. The films from that era are a prodigious lot: Gunga Din, Citizen Kane, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Love Affair, The Little Foxes, The Magnificent Ambersons — and three from Dieterle. The second and third were from Dieterle’s own production company and distributed by RKO, specifically because of the pleasure he had working with Schaefer on his first RKO pic, 1939’s THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME. Hunchback is a beloved work; I’ve seen both viewers and reviewers proclaim it their favorite film. My response is a touch chillier; in taking on this essay, I could point to this film as proof that I still had my wits about me where Dieterle was concerned. Although I admire the performances, the look, the lensing and the extraordinary mise-en-scène (with thousands upon thousands of extras executing a mob mentality), I find the script problematic.
Despite an opening scroll that charts France’s uneasy passage out of the Middle Ages — and the superstition and prejudice that stood in the way of progress — we still have to hear it all laid out again in dialogue in the first few scenes: the King’s embrace of the printing press, his insistence that the world is round, and his resentment of the persecution of the oppressed — all while his advisors beg him to maintain the status quo. It’s terribly heavy-handed. (Did screenwriter Sonya Levien suspect that audiences would skip over the scroll, or did she fear that — like the downtrodden masses in the movie — they didn’t know how to read?) The exposition masking as characterization is horrible, as when the King announces, “I’m glad I’m living in this age of great beginnings.” But the purple prose isn’t much better, as when the poet Gregoire discovers the gypsy Esmeralda has saved her heart for another man: “So you don’t love me. It was nothing but pity, pity, pity!” And although the viciousness and fickleness of the crowd — who lust only for sensation — is well established, the lead characters don’t seem to be blessed with consistent convictions or common sense either. Esmeralda is quickly established as the worst judge of character in screen history. She flees from Quasimodo, even though she’s been assured he’s harmless; she pledges her heart to Phoebus following an interaction lasting roughly eight seconds; and most outrageously, she assures Frollo, who’s done nothing but threaten her, “Somewhere in your heart there must be love.” (She tells him this after he admits he likes animals, although for all she knows, he means that he likes them seared on a grill and delicately seasoned.)
The script is strangled by its static start, and the proportions feel misjudged, with cursory character introductions in need of enlarging and expansive passages that cry out for condensing. It’s not until 55 minutes that the balance rights itself, when Esmeralda brings Quasimodo some water after his flogging, and we’re allowed to linger on a critical emotional beat. Suddenly, after an hour of incident — all of it precise, some of it effective — we move into a moving confluence of acting, direction and design. And music! Alfred Newman offers a soft setting of Esmeralda’s Theme as she climbs the stairs to Quasimodo; he resists, then gives in to her radiance and empathy, and the theme grows broader. And from that moment, the set-pieces — the death of Phoebus, the trial of Esmeralda, the rescue by Quasimodo, the interrogation by the King, the siege of Notre Dame — proceed with an inevitability that grows heartbreaking, and the ironies — and there are many — are never subordinated to the scale of the production. The second half resonates in a way the first half never could, when the script was consumed with overemphatic exposition and plot-driven characterization. (I praise Dieterle often in this essay as someone who could take the curse off a lengthy or unlikely set-up — but when the proportions are this far afield, I don’t see what more he could have done.)
Dieterle is aided immeasurably by the cinematography by Joseph H. August, the art direction by Van Nest Polglase and, of course, the makeup design by Perc Westmore. The level of detail and ambition is impressive, but so is the degree of soulfulness. Few directors were able to project their own starry-eyed notions about filmmaking onto the screen as Dieterle could; he was a romanticist in the manner of Borzage, but his romanticism was tempered by delicacy and restraint. He could stage a spectacle with the best of them (and in many ways, Hunchback is the culmination of everything he’d learned since making his directorial debut in 1923), but he could also refresh a simple exchange with penetrating insight. The conversation between Quasimodo and Esmeralda in the bell tower is Dieterle at his best. During a series of questions and confessions, the two forge a connection — Esmeralda at once grateful and confused, charmed and alarmed; Quasimodo, wounded by longing and self-pity. Dieterle keeps the tone measured but the staging fluid. Quasimodo is consistently shot among his surroundings: the scaffolding, the ropes, the bells. It’s the setting that keeps him comfortable — and holds him hostage. Esmeralda is captured mostly in gauzy close-up: a creature of pure emotion, encumbered by and attached to nothing. In his filming of this crucial scene, Dieterle not only sets up Quasimodo’s heartbreak to come, but justifies the largely inconsistent way that Esmeralda has been written. (Although the script improves in the second half, Levien continues to use exposition as a crutch. After Quasimodo rescues Esmeralda from hanging, workers at Notre Dame are left to act as the clumsiest of Greek choruses. "Maybe he's in love with her," one speculates, in case we haven’t been paying attention, and another asks — out of nowhere — “Is that lead hot enough to pour yet?," setting up the siege to come.) Dieterle is able to attend to past, present and future in a way that the script never manages to.
As noted, I have my issues with Hunchback. I find if I can get to the midway mark, I’m gratified to continue to the end — but I’ve started and stopped the film as many times as I’ve finished it. But how I love Dieterle’s next project for RKO: a movie with the same power to entertain and surprise that it had 80 years ago. THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER is at once a dark fairy tale and a glistening fever dream. It’s a morality play about the corrupting power of greed, an allegorical critique of American isolationism and a socialist treatise on the value of unionism. It’s also, like so many works dealing with the devil, a hell of a lot of fun.
In 1840’s New Hampshire, the devil comes to call on impoverished farmer Jabez Stone. The devil is Walter Huston in a goatee, both huckster and conman; Stone is James Craig, eager faced and easy prey. Stone hasn’t got a prayer. He willingly agrees to part with his soul for seven years of wealth. The Faust legend had inspired countless adaptations over the years; Dieterle, who had appeared in F. W. Murnau's 1926 silent film Faust, decided that Stephen Vincent Benét's short story The Devil and Daniel Webster would be an ideal first feature for his new production company, and invited Benét himself to do the adaptation.
Dieterle’s version honors the German Expressionist elements in Murnau’s film — with its large painted sets, sharp contrast of light and dark, enormous shadows and extreme angles — but it also revels in the sort of technical and story-telling wizardry that Schaefer’s tenure at RKO seemed to inspire: magnificent mobile camera work, remarkable time compressions and complex shots involving long, continuous passages of dialogue. And for a Faustian fable, it maintains a tone all its own: alternately serious-minded and archly funny. Add in August’s chiaroscuro photography, Robert Wise’s lightning-quick editing and Bernard Herrmann’s Oscar-winning score (which rebrands folk songs with a demonic twist) and you’ve got that rare item from the Golden Age of Hollywood: a major-studio art film. (The 106-minute film premiered as All That Money Can Buy; the studio feared the original title made it sound too much like a historical piece. It was later distributed as The Devil and Daniel Webster, then recut in 1952 as Daniel and the Devil, clocking in at just 84 minutes. It took nearly half a century for the lost footage to be located.)
The New York Herald Tribune proclaimed the film “a rare motion picture achievement.” The New York World-Telegram called it “superbly acted, directed and written.” The New York Post hailed it as “one of the season’s best pictures.” And The New York Times did not like it at all. So I guess it’s time now to discuss the nightmare that is Bosley Crowther. Something odd happened around the time Dieterle formed his own production company; Crowther took over as lead film critic for The New York Times and decided he hated Dieterle. It’s long been my assertion that Crowther was the single worst film critic to ever grace the pages of a major metropolitan newspaper. He loved to posture that he was a staid intellectual, but he could be petty and irrational when it came to airing his grievances. I discussed him briefly in my essay on Errol Flynn, one of the stars Crowther loathed for impenetrable reasons. Alan Ladd, Loretta Young, James Dean and Joan Crawford were others. (He didn’t just hate Ladd, he actively mocked his fans.) And no director offended him — deeply, personally, unaccountably — like Dieterle. And it all starts with The Devil and Daniel Webster, which according to Crowther
“…should be one of the best pictures of the year, [but] it is not. For Mr. Dieterle has failed to bring into focus before our eyes that which is supposed to be real and that which is supernatural. One is likely to be confused by the constant interplay of shadow and substance without any explanations. Neither has Mr. Dieterle the ‘feel’ of New England in his film. The sets are too obviously artificial; the fields and hills are mostly painted backdrops. This is one picture which should have been shot against the solid New Hampshire earth. And it should have been directed by someone who understood New England.”
To this day, I don’t think I’ve seen a stranger review from a major-league film critic. Could Crowther really not distinguish between the real and the supernatural, as he claims? When the devil (aka Scratch) makes his first appearance in an explosion of streaming, glowing backlight — accompanied by Herrmann’s eerie mélange of telephone wires humming and animals moaning — did Crowther truly not see that as suggestive of his unearthly origins? When Stone throws an ax at Scratch — and through a mix of stop-motion substitution, rear projection and traveling matte — the ax bursts into flame before hitting its target, did Crowther not recognize that as a demonstration of Satan’s power? (Did he suppose the ax spontaneously combusted?) Did Crowther not view the out-of-focus camerawork at Stone’s self-congratulatory ball — or the filtration that saturates the prisoners at his trial — as confirmation that the creatures in attendance were not of this world? And when Stone makes his pact with the devil, and Dieterle leaves the upper half of his face in light while casting the bottom half into shadow, could Crowther not picture it as a visual manifestation of the conflict raging within: Stone’s greed and despair blotting out his reason? Dieterle makes his points with such precision, it’s unfathomable that anyone — let alone the voice of the Times — could be so confused.
And the notion of the film not capturing the “feel” of New England is absurd. I grew up in New Hampshire, the setting of The Devil and Daniel Webster. On my drive to high school, I passed a town and a farm (with fields beside them and hills beyond) exactly like the ones in the film — that is, if they were reimagined as a pastoral idyll in a painting by John Constable or Thomas Cole. (The hardiness, the stubbornness, the prayerfulness and the pridefulness of the characters ring true as well.) And how in heavens is a fantasy about a man brokering a deal with the devil “one picture which should’ve been shot against the solid New Hampshire earth?” Does Crowther really believes that that’s a story-line where the chief aim should be realism? And his assertion that it should’ve been directed by someone “who understands New England” might be the biggest reach of all. Is he suggesting someone who understands New England in 1840? (Which studio director would that be exactly?) Or is he implying the land and its people hadn’t changed in a century? (And if Crowther is honestly insisting that directors should be assigned to films only if they’re well-versed in the setting, then the hypocrisy is unforgivable, because he had no reservations about praising How Green Is My Valley a mere 12 days later, even though John Ford shot the Welsh film with Irish performers and Irish tunes — and admitted to an almost proud ignorance of Welsh customs.) The Devil and Daniel Webster is a portrait of America at its best and its worst; it’s about the lure of capitalism, and the disregard for the plight of one’s fellowmen that often accompanies the accumulation of wealth. As a German expat, it’s arguable that Dieterle recognized — and thus captured — those qualities better than someone who was born here.
Something in Crowther’s hardwiring malfunctioned between his reverential review of Dieterle for A Dispatch From Reuters and his obtuse and patronizing review of his work on his next film, The Devil and Daniel Webster — and whatever caused Crowther to crack (the increasing politicization of Dieterle’s films, perhaps?), it was a wound that only worsened. Dieterle was at this point at the peak of his creative powers, and everyone knew it. Notably, every time a critic subbed for Crowther, the result was a rave — both for the film and for Dieterle himself: on Tennessee Johnson, on Kismet, on The Accused, on Rope of Sand. And that seemed to incense Crowther even more. Did his regular bashing of Dieterle contribute to the tarnishing of Dieterle’s reputation? How could it not? Did it contribute to his eventual inability to get work? Quite possibly.
But enough about Crowther. Thank goodness The New York Times now has its head on straight where Dieterle is concerned.
Oh, wait.
“Best remembered for plodding prestige pictures like The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Dieterle has been typecast as a snobbish martinet. Still, he has a few surprises in his lengthy résumé.” — J. Hoberman (The New York Times, 2015)
I would question if Dieterle is really best remembered for Emile Zola. Aren’t people far more likely to remember The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or The Devil and Daniel Webster, or romances like Love Letters or Portrait of Jennie? Denigrating Dieterle in such a fashion helps make Hoberman‘s case that he has “a few surprises in his lengthy résumé.” (Just a few, mind you.) I come away from that quote suspecting that Hoberman knows little of Dieterle’s work or his temperament. Nothing I’ve seen or read suggests that Dieterle was typecast — then or now — as “a snobbish martinet.” He could be a disciplinarian — but not nearly as much as a colleague like Curtiz, whose disregard for those beneath him prompted him to drown a handful of extras on the set of Noah’s Ark, to achieve the proper sense of realism. Perhaps Hoberman is referencing the fact that Dieterle always wore white gloves on the set — although Dieterle was candid about the reason. During the years in Germany when he was not only directing and acting in his films, but attending to the technical elements, Dieterle often had to stop a scene to fix the set — and wearing gloves kept his hands from getting dirty before filming recommenced. Those gloves became a fixture of his directing apparel; perhaps they were a good luck charm. But given that we know why he started wearing them, it’s an odd and dismissive presumption that he continued to do so because he was — as Hoberman puts it — snobbish.
Anyway, the next film from Dieterle’s production company took on cultural appropriation; man, talk about snobbish. SYNCOPATION (1942) is a musical marvel that’s been almost willfully misunderstood for nearly a century. (It’s the film Hoberman was referring to when he mentioned “a few surprises,” and like his predecessor, he chose to willfully misunderstand it.) Syncopation is another film where we have to weed out preconceptions. Because Dieterle had to cave to his investors on a few key points — they insisted the social and racial commentary be subordinated to the love story — the legend has grown that the film grew somehow tame and diluted in the process. That presumption does a disservice to Dieterle, who was no stranger to late-stage rewrites. The onscreen romance between real-life sweethearts Bonita Granville and Jackie Cooper takes up more time than Dieterle initially intended, yes, and Todd Duncan, whose role was meant to be pivotal, receives a rather cursory sendoff midway through. But none of that detracts from the overall impact, because Syncopation — unlike most every other Hollywood property at the time — is not a character-driven film.
Syncopation is about the musical and social fabric of the United States, from the turn of the 20th century through to World War II. It’s about how sounds forged in African-American communities were adopted and adapted by white musicians, and how expressions of sorrow became remedies for it. It’s about blues and jazz, ragtime and Dixieland, boogie woogie and swing — where they sprang from and how they spread, and how the major cities made the sounds uniquely their own. Early in the film, Granville’s family relocates from New Orleans to Chicago by journeying up the Mississippi by paddleboat. But the emphasis isn’t on them. The emphasis is on how the sound of the blues changes as it, too, makes its way up the river: from the street-corner soulfulness of Basin Street to the ragtime-infused syncopations of Beale Street, from the thumping “jump blues” of St. Louis to the sprawling urban style of Chicago. In Syncopation, everything we commonly think of as plot — the central couple falling in love, the boyhood friend who doesn’t return from the war, the mother who barely gets to celebrate her son’s celebrity — is mere connective tissue. Front and center is a story about the roots and growth of American music, and its power as both a balm and a tonic.
When war is declared in 1917, a ragtime session gives way to a marching band seeing soldiers off to battle; Jackie Cooper’s trumpeter links the scenes, and we’re reminded — without ever feeling lectured to — how the music popularized by marching bands helped inspire the ragtime movement. When Cooper — envious that the girl he’s fallen for (Granville) is seeing off another guy — breaks away from the band and improvises a sad solo, it’s not the standard Hollywood expression of unrequited love. The irony runs deeper; Cooper is only able to express his pain because Granville introduced him to the blues she grew up with on Bourbon Street. Later, Cooper hears a New Orleans jazz band in action and begs for a chance to sit in on a jam session; he’s so energized that he stays till dawn, ignoring his curfew and winding up behind bars — but he shrugs off his time in jail. Later still, when he’s secured a gig with a big-city orchestra that postures it brings jazz to the general public (it’s a savage sendup of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra and its self-proclaimed mission to “make a lady out of jazz”), he finds the blandness of the material enervating. He’d always seen music as a form of self-expression; now it’s merely a means of paying the rent. His mechanical playing, night after night, induces a sort of deadened delirium — and as he stares at the notes on his score, they suddenly lift off the page, expanding and contorting until they come to resemble prison bars: holding him hostage, denying him access to his dreams. His time in the slammer was easy; it’s his musical confinement that feels torturous.
The big set-piece near the end is the triumph of those who love jazz over those who would use it, and at the climax the newlyweds rejoice in their newfound optimism — not that their love will last, but that their kind of music will. (The film finishes with a wild time leap into the ’40s, and you will never see more a compelling reason why Gene Krupa became a superstar.) The ambitions of Syncopation dwarf even those of The Devil and Daniel Webster; occasionally, its accomplishments do too. Had Dieterle’s production company been able to support itself, who knows what he might’ve managed. But in the meantime, following the financial failure of these two films, Dieterle was back to freelance work. But great freelance work.
MGM wanted to tell the story of Andrew Johnson, the first (and at that time only) President to be impeached, and so naturally they turned to Dieterle, master of the biopic. Watching TENNESSEE JOHNSON, you can tell how much the Warners brass had pressed him to make their bios dignified. MGM doesn’t seem to give a fig about dignity; they just want a rousing good story — and Dieterle delivers. The opening scene — in which Johnson (Van Heflin), an escapee from an apprenticeship, cuts his shackles — might be a metaphor; freed from the restrictions of the Warner Bros. factory, the passion and poetry that had lain largely dormant in his Warners biopics reemerge. And as he had done a decade earlier, Dieterle speaks volumes in silence; in something as straighforward as a pan of the Senate chamber, he not only pushes forward the narrative, but comments on the proceedings. (MGM assigned its top cinematographer Harold Rossen, and it’s arguable that Dieterle never had a more sympathetic collaborator.) Tennessee Johnson is an odd work. Johnson’s temper, his early illiteracy, his feelings of inferiority — those have basis in historical fact. But the conflict between him and Thaddeus Stevens (Lionel Barrymore) about the treatment of the South following the Civil War — the centerpiece of the film — regularly misrepresents both parties in the interests of making Johnson a hero. But Dieterle — well aware of the script’s inadequacies — moves beyond the “reconciliation vs retribution” conflict that anchors the film, and (as he was wont to do) captures some of the challenges and contradictions inherent in American life: the obsession of the rich to keep the poor in their place; the struggle between federal and states rights, which can be bent to suit any argument. It’s a smart bit of subversive Americana — a rousing and reprehensible piece of fiction. Having enjoyed their association with Dieterle, MGM kept him around for KISMET (1944), which was both lovingly received and lavishly attended. Its relative obscurity today can be blamed on the auteur theory. (It’s to blame for so much.) Because Vincent Minnelli directed the musical version in 1955 (a dreadful film, and a box office flop to boot), Dieterle’s film has been largely ignored, while auteurists poke through the ashes of Minnelli’s movie, searching for signs of his signature. If Minnelli couldn’t manage the material, they ask, how could Dieterle? And the answer is: with ease and panache. Ronald Colman, Marlene Dietrich and Edward Arnold understand exactly what audiences enjoy about their onscreen personae, and how to tweak them for maximum mileage; they seem to be having a grand time. The colorful costumes suggest a fairytale — just what the prelude has promised — and every time we’re treated to a shot of the pastel-green palace walls rising to just this side of heaven, it’s like someone’s smoking a hookah, and its hallucinatory effects have wafted off the screen and enveloped our senses.
Dieterle — very much in demand — was scooped up next by producer David O. Selznick. On the surface, I’LL BE SEEING YOU is another of those “aren’t we noble?” celebrations of Americana that cluttered the screen during the war years — but underneath, it’s more an indictment than a celebration. It’s about how innocent people are needlessly incarcerated. It’s about how we send soldiers off to battle, patch up their bodies and leave them to attend to their mental wounds. And it’s about how we infantilize our children to shield them from life’s unpleasantries. Unlike Selznick’s Since You Went Away from earlier that year, it’s not about the sacrifices we face while fighting a common enemy; it’s about how society leaves some of us to struggle on our own. As it takes place during Christmas week, and features a budding relationship between Ginger Rogers (a secretary incarcerated for the accidental death of her lecherous boss) and Joseph Cotten (a soldier suffering from trauma, trying to regain control over his body and spirit), it’s sometimes described as a “holiday romance.” And yes, it’s possible to see it as affirmation of the redemptive power of love; in fact, that very much seems to be the film that Selznick and screenwriter Marion Parsonnet intend. But what Dieterle focuses on are Rogers and Cotten’s feelings of isolation, their terror, their bitterness and their reserve — all of it in stark contrast to those going on with their lives: opening presents and decorating trees — and convincing themselves that nothing much has changed since the U.S. entered the war, except maybe it’s a little harder to get chocolate. Dieterle had a flair for forging characters who seem perched between despair and deliverance, desperate to shield themselves from pain while — quite despite themselves — plunging headfirst into danger. They were both fearful and reckless. I suspect if anything in Dieterle’s catalog makes mincemeat of the auteur theory, it’s this film. It’s technically sound and thematically rich — full of grace notes that you recognize at once as common to Dieterle’s work. It’s also got that requisite tug-of-war that Sarris deemed essential to auteurism — since Dieterle is painting a much more disturbing picture of American life than Selznick and Parsonnet intended. It’s the Dieterle film that one could argue most establishes the artist as an auteur. Yet it’s also — of all the films he turned out during the 1940’s — one of the slightest.
As opposed to Dieterle’s next film, LOVE LETTERS (1945), which is a pivotal work. Another wartime drama, it has none of the jingoistic aspirations that I’ll Be Seeing You wears like a badge of honor; as a matter of fact, it would be easy to read a synopsis and presume it’s sentimental twaddle. But in the hands of Dieterle and screenwriter Ayn Rand (in one of her two Hollywood assignments) — plus stars Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten, with sterling support from Gladys George, Cecil Kellaway, Ann Richards and Anita Louise — Love Letters becomes so much more than a summary would suggest. Rand takes the source material — Christopher Massie’s novel Pity My Simplicity, which she described (accurately) as “a holy mess” — strips it bare and rebuilds it as a screenplay about two lost souls finding each other against a backdrop of violence and pain. It’s a meditation on grief and guilt; who better to film it than Dieterle?
Love Letters starts with one soldier’s foolish act of kindness, and from there, events spiral out of control. And by the time the soldier has been injured, treated and relieved of duty, he’s left to survey the damage: his army buddy murdered, the woman of his dreams institutionalized, her guardian hospitalized. And he blames himself for it all. Alan Quinton (Cotten, in his second of five films with Dieterle) wants only to escape, but fate refuses to cut him loose. At a party, he meets Singleton (Jones, in her first of two films with Dieterle) and realizes she’s the woman he was writing love letters to throughout the war. (He was penning the notes for his army pal, but found himself opening up in ways he couldn’t to his own fiancée.) Singleton is as damaged as he is; she endured a trauma she’s blocked out entirely. Yet the two of them remain — as they were when they were pouring out their hearts in prose — kindred spirits. "Ever since I came back from the war, l've wanted to be alone,” he confesses to her: “I've been miserable with other people. You're the first one with whom I feel at peace." And she understands: "That's because you're broken up inside almost the same as I am.”
Throughout his career, Dieterle had a knack for bringing the unlikeliest scenarios to life: for infusing performances with such gentle conviction and scenes with such bewitching detail that you glossed over the more onerous aspects of the plot. Nowhere are these talents put to better use than in Love Letters. Rand takes her time setting the plot in motion — 50 minutes elapse before the two stars push past the exposition and engage in their first full scene — but you never feel bogged down in backstory. Even as Rand is putting the pieces in place, Dieterle is honing in on the heart of the story and bathing it in psychological beats — and strong ones: alienation and obsession, foreboding and self-loathing. He ensures that a set of contrivances and coincidences that could easily come off as outrageous grow thoroughly absorbing.
To Rand’s credit, Love Letters never postures that Alan and Singleton are somehow brave or noble for forging a life together — Rand avoids all the common traps. They’re simply swept up in an unspoken need to stop feeling so alone. They’re troubled by their pasts and uncertain of their futures; they know that by entering into this relationship, they’re courting pain, but they can’t seem to help themselves. Singleton has reverted to her essence — there’s a playfulness, a girlishness about her; Rand’s screenplay — like Massie’s novel — insists that once life is no longer filtered through expectation and experience, we’re free to appreciate it more fully. But as much of a Pollyanna as Singleton has become, a darkness keeps creeping over her that she struggles to set aside. Her amnesia is both liberating and alarming; as much as she revels in her newfound ability to live in the moment, she’s forever on her guard: fearful of her memories returning, and what they might reveal — and what that might mean for her relationship with Alan.
The film plays with memory throughout: sometimes ironically, other times playfully or pointedly. People keep urging Alan to forget his time on the front lines, as if it’s that simple. (His fiancée insists, “The war is over for you. Over and done with. You mustn't look back and get morbid.”) But only alcohol helps him forget, and he’s drunk the night he meets Singleton; when she later references their time together, his mind is a blur. (She has amnesia, but he’s got the bad memory.) And Singleton keeps glimpsing images from her past, but the pieces refuse to fall into place, as if silently, stubbornly defying her. The characters in Love Letters have made terrible choices: oh, they might have seemed innocent or justifiable or even generous at the time, but they weren’t that at all — and now they’re forced to carry on. And they do so under a cloud of shame or regret or denial. (As Rand imagines it, Singleton’s amnesia is merely a different kind of coping mechanism.) Love Letters is a film about the mistakes we struggle to forget, the ones we choose to forget and the ones we’re forced to forget. How much do we have the courage to face — and more than that, to rectify?
Dieterle’s direction — in his by-now signature style — manages to be starry-eyed yet clearheaded. Yet there’s something more at play. It was his first time working with cinematographer Lee Garmes — whose dramatic use of chiaroscuro was said to be influenced by the paintings of Rembrandt — and with art director Roland Anderson, DeMille’s favorite, who — as the ’30s gave way to the ’40s — traded his customary Art Deco look for something closer to Art Nouveau. Their work prompts Dieterle to lean into the headier indulgences common to these sorts of romantic melodramas — no doubt because he knows he can counter them with reminders of love’s elusiveness and impermanence. On first glance, the fog-enshrouded farmhouse where Alan and Singleton make their home feels like the same cozy English cottage we’ve seen countless times on the screen. Yet on closer inspection, it’s both lived in yet strangely closed off: an idyll that seems to exist outside of time itself. The angles and proportions are odd. Diagonal beams and banisters keep intruding from the corners of the screen. In the garden, even tree limbs cut through the country air, framing the pair — as if the real world lies in wait, threatening to encroach on their happiness. (The first time the mailman arrives, the long approach of his dark figure — captured through an open door — makes him seem like the Angel of Death.) As Dieterle shoots it, the longer Alan and Singleton’s love lasts, the more vulnerable it becomes.
Yet even as Dieterle gives himself over to Rand’s conceits — that true love can’t exist without a clear sense of self, that deception can only lead to disaster — watch how he refreshes every potential cliché: Alan’s drunken confessional the night he meets Singleton, which he inverts by showing his empty glass hitting the floor, then panning up till we reach Alan himself, soliloquizing; Alan and Singleton’s first kiss, which he camouflages with a bit about her losing the heel of her shoe (it’s another Dieterle scene that he seems to have improvised on the set: in this case so that their sudden snog surprises us as much as it does them); and the manner in which the murder is re-enacted, which he neatly foreshadows by underscoring the stark lighting in the cottage where it took place. Bask in the detail with which he infuses the scene where Alan revisits a bedroom he frequented as a child — one his late aunt saw fit to preserve with objects that anchor him to his childhood and anticipate his adulthood — and the care with which Alan shares that room with Singleton. And marvel at how Dieterle skirts the most dangerous cliché of all, when Singleton’s memories come flooding back.
That scene might be my favorite in all of Dieterle’s catalog — and not even the whole scene: just one minute of it. It’s classic continuity editing steered by a director’s strong point of view. As Singleton begs her guardian (Gladys Cooper) for answers, Dieterle starts with Jones and Cooper in a two-shot, then as Cooper starts to open up about the past, catches her over Jones’s shoulder. Just before she reveals a crucial puzzle piece that’s certain to leave Jones shaken, Dieterle reframes the shot: capturing Jones face on, and Cooper in profile. And as the riddle starts to unravel, Jones rises and makes her way into the living room. The camera pulls back to accommodate the move — then widens even more than it needs to: the opening of the lens not merely reflecting but anticipating the steady return of her memories. Other directors might choose that moment to revert to a close-up, but Dieterle loved to use the camera’s sense of freedom to mirror the characters’ own. He had a gift for putting fluid emotions right onto the screen — often through the way the camera chose to explore and interact with its environment. Here, Dieterle doesn’t so much shadow Singleton as guide her through the room, opening it up so she can once again inhabit it — and so her heart can finally start to heal. Love Letters is a film about the toll life takes on our spirit, and about the risks we take for love. And it’s about the risks we take for art. Dieterle bares his soul here more than in any other film. While exercising his customary taste and restraint, he proves unafraid to flirt with excess — to bathe the love story in darkness and abandon — and in doing so, he reinvigorates its tiredest tropes. He rushes headlong into uncharted territory, like his characters, and unwittingly redirects his own career.
Buoyed by the critical and box-office triumph of Love Letters (four Oscar nods, including Best Actress), Dieterle chose another romantic melodrama: this one a one-off for Universal. THIS LOVE OF OURS is a story practically designed for Dieterle, in which married couple Merle Oberon and Charles Korvin, separated for a decade after one awful misunderstanding, try to rebuild their lives. Dieterle does wonders for Oberon, who could be hard to read onscreen, and occasionally hard to watch. Aside from a few early scenes in which she flirts merrily with Korvin, her character is a study in repression: repressed anger, repressed grief, repressed affection. It’s rather an ideal role for her; the fact that she’s got so much simmering beneath the surface means she never goes blank, and Dieterle’s insistence on discretion curbs her excesses. (It doesn’t hurt that she’s shot, gorgeously, by her husband Lucien Ballard.) So much of This Love of Ours works that it’s maddening when the screenwriters keep dropping the ball. There are stupefying lapses in logic. But Oberon and Korvin share good chemistry, Claude Rains (as a caricaturist with a keen understanding of the human heart) provides both the requisite wariness and wisdom, and the final sequence is so well-paced and well-structured that you come away strangely satisfied. (The setting is a child’s birthday party, and like so many Dieterle crowd scenes, it simulates spontaneity with almost balletic precision.) In lesser hands, the film could have been a disaster; with Dieterle and his stars giving it their all, it’s surprisingly, compulsively rewatchable.
This Love of Ours — for all that’s charming about it — is a trifle; THE SEARCHING WIND (1946) is a major effort. Lillian Hellman disliked her 1944 Broadway play — a stinging censure of the U.S. policy of appeasement — because she felt it was too overtly political. She reimagined it for the screen — kept maybe 20% of the original — and forged something far superior. We see history unfold through the effect it has on three characters — specifically through the tug-of-war two women engage in over one man. Dieterle gives it the deliberate gloss of a woman’s picture of the mid-’40s, and through that familiar prism, we glimpse not only the rise of fascism, but the unwillingness of so many to denounce it.
The man at the heart of the story, Alexander Hazen (Robert Young), has been entrusted — like his father before him — with a powerful political post, but he’s terrified of his own influence. He keeps misreading situations, or claiming to — you can’t tell which. As diplomat, then ambassador, he watches Mussolini seize power in Italy and the rise of the National Socialist Party in Germany — then both countries supply aircraft and ammunition to Franco in Spain — yet he can’t bring himself to condemn it as escalating fascism. He’s full of questions — “what can I do?” and “how could I change anything?” — that he poses mostly to the woman he loves, Cassie Bowman (Sylvia Sidney), but he’s not looking for answers; he’s serving up an excuse for his inaction. He’s fond of pointing out that no one man dictates the law in the United States — because it absolves him of responsibility. The film starts in 1946, as he’s putting old files into storage (as his father-in-law puts it, “preserving his mistakes”). We eventually flash back to 1922 and follow him through the decades, as his charm and assurance dwindle, and his countenance grows careworn. It’s the most complex role Young had essayed — and he does well by it.
Cassie is one of two women that Alex grew up with — the other a publisher’s daughter, Emily Taney (Ann Richards). When we first flash back to 1922, Alex and Cassie have gotten engaged; they’re young and in love — and an unlikely pair. When Mussolini marches on Rome, Cassie begs Alex to send an accurate report back to the States, but he insists he’s uncertain what he’s witnessing: “I think this is a civil war. I can’t take sides.” But she’s quick to counter, “Whenever people talk about not taking sides, they’ve already taken them.” Cassie is unlike Alex in outlook and temperament, and perhaps that’s why she’s so drawn to him. She’s perceptive and insightful — insightful enough to know she has to break off their engagement; the rise of fascism turns her into an eager, ambitious journalist. (She’s an English professor in the play, far removed from the action; she gets a huge upgrade in the film.) She intuitively understands the magnitude of events as they unfold — but as Sidney plays it, Cassie’s insights only serve to make more her easily rattled. Her nerves keep getting the better of her — and the woman Alex rebounds with, Emily, learns how to take advantage of that.
Emily understands more of what’s happening in the world than she lets on — but she doesn’t dwell on it; she’s too busy enjoying the company of the socialites and the power players who pursue her because of her husband‘s position and her family wealth. She finds it easier to maintain and assert control than Cassie, but she’s haunted by loneliness. (Ann Richards never became the star Hal Wallis hoped she’d be, but she’s perfect here; she has that air of empty, forced sophistication that Hellman captured so well.) Emily is privileged and petty and terminally insecure; Cassie is politically astute and socially naïve, and the man she loves lacks the courage of her convictions. The Searching Wind isn’t one of those films about the competitiveness between two women where one is reduced to victimhood or martyrdom. On the contrary, both these women get exactly what they want, each step of the way, but they remain quietly resentful and mistrustful. And vulnerable to each other. And for 24 years, Alex — hungering for Cassie, but yoked to Emily — practices the same sort of appeasement in his personal life that he does professionally.
Producer Hal Wallis lavished money on the film, and Dieterle lets you see every penny. (The cinematography is by Lee Garmes, who’d done Love Letters, and the art direction by Franz Bachelin, who’d attend to most of the Dieterle-Wallis productions to come.) The furnishings become fixtures every bit as important as the actors themselves. Hellman aims her rage at those who sell out humanity by bartering with their souls; she targets them, but doesn’t explain them. Dieterle does. Each time Alex and Emily settle into new surroundings — dwarfed and framed and overshadowed by the objets d’art that adorn them — you’re reminded how easy it is for people of privilege to grow inured to the suffering of others. It’s opulence as isolationism.
The Searching Wind proceeds with such sweep and aplomb, its flaws grow all the more apparent. The brief stopover in Spain feels aimless — it’s the one time you feel Hellman dawdling, and Dieterle can’t figure out how to energize it. Albert Basserman — in a quick but key appearance — feels a little fussily comic, like the magnificent 78-year-old codger came up with a characterization he was proud of and Dieterle didn’t have the heart to correct him. And the choral singing over the opening and closing is a bit much. But none of it matters. The film was one of Dieterle‘s greatest even before its theme — the signs of fascism that are overlooked, and why — regained its relevance. In the final scenes (set once more in 1946), having had the patterns of their past paraded before them, Alex and Cassie are forced to accept their incompatibility. He admits he’s always lied to her about his political intentions in order to hold on to her — and she comes to recognize that Alex and Emily are kindred spirits. (If anything, she feels liberated by the long-overdue epiphany.) The Searching Wind surprises you by denying you the happy ending you were expecting. Instead, it decries Alex and Emily’s lack of courage and conviction, then takes pains to shame them in front of their son. Small wonder the film failed at the box office. It was released barely a year after the end of World War II. Who wanted to see a movie that told Americans they could — and must — do better?
”By the mid-1940s Dieterle was under Selznick's wing ….. Portrait of Jennie [is] indication of how often the women's picture encourages moderate talent into abandoning caution." — David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002)
Nothing about Dieterle’s work suggests caution. (Thomson is confusing caution with restraint.) On the contrary, an examination of even his earliest work in Hollywood reveals how daring he was. (Darryl Zanuck, head of production at Warner Bros. between 1931 and 1933, was initially displeased by Dieterle’s innovations on the set, until he saw how effective they were in the dailies.) And only one of five films he directed in the mid-’40s was produced by Selznick, and only one more came along a few years later; that seems a very liberal use of “under someone’s wing.” Besides, part of the fascination of PORTRAIT OF JENNIE is how Selznick keeps trying to tuck Dieterle under his wing, and how Dieterle refuses to let him.
In Depression-era New York, struggling artist Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) has a chance encounter with an enigmatic schoolgirl, Jennie Appleton. Encouraging him to wait for her until she has “time to grow up,” she scurries off, but inspires him to paint a sketch from memory, tapping into emotions he’d been unable to access. Jennie quickly becomes Eben’s muse, but with a tantalizing twist: each time they meet, she’s aged far beyond the short time he last saw her. He watches her grow from childhood to young adulthood in a matter of months. Who is Jennie Appleton, how can she skip through time so easily — and can Eben paint without her?
Selznick had spent much of the ’40s shaping the career of his obsession (and soon-to-be wife) Jennifer Jones. On their previous collaboration, Duel in the Sun, King Vidor was the credited director, but Selznick’s obsessiveness drove Vidor away, and Selznick ran through no less than six replacements, including himself. He engaged four writers on Portrait of Jennie (among them, Paul Osborn and an uncredited Ben Hecht), but in terms of helmers, no one got near it but Dieterle. No one was better equipped to navigate its unconventional love story (Eben comes to court a young woman he first meets when she’s barely in her teens) while keeping its spiritual elements from growing too effete or too self-conscious — and Selznick knew it. And because Dieterle knew that Selznick knew, it emboldened him to shape and shoot Portrait of Jennie in ways that spoke to him most persuasively. It’s his most intimate and revealing film.
The film’s creative and visual aspirations are unparalleled: shots look like they’ve been pulled straight from a canvas. Cinematographer Joseph H. August filmed through special filters that replicated the texture of oil paintings, using lenses from his silent film days. His sleight-of-hand has us questioning what is genuine and what is “merely” an illusion; at times our own world seems as removed from reality as the one Jennie must have sprung from. When Jennie appears to Eben, has she slipped through a crack in the fabric of time, or is he being exposed to a fuller view of the universe than most of us can see? Is the universe, in fact, doing for Eben what artists do for their audiences: allow them to see the world in a way they hadn’t readily understood? August and Dieterle retain the remarkable synergy they’d honed on Hunchback and The Devil and Daniel Webster. August died of a heart attack before filming was completed — he was replaced by an uncredited Lee Garmes — but was posthumously nominated for an Oscar. (The film took home the trophy for Special Effects.) As he and Dieterle conceive it, Central Park is at once a retreat for revelers, where it’s easy to get lost in the throng, and a hideaway of almost haunted seclusion — endless stretches of narrow paths and shallow hills — where you’re more likely to get lost in your own thoughts, or consumed by someone else’s.
Selznick was aghast at how many extras Dieterle insisted on for a backdrop of skaters in Central Park, but as you watch, you feel like you’re seeing the world as Eben does: as a canvas waiting to be painted — here, perhaps, a piece in the style of Agnes Tait or Leon Kroll. Everything is filtered through Eben’s eyes. Unlike Dieterle’s most recent adaptations, Love Letters and The Searching Wind, Portrait of Jennie remains faithful to its source (Robert Nathan’s 1940 novel of the same title). Only the novel’s theological side is muted. Nathan spends a lot of time ruminating on God’s place in the universe; Dieterle largely ignores such matters. He ties Jennie’s appearances less to a quest for religious clarity than to Eben’s journey toward creative fulfillment. Portrait of Jennie is about the artistic process: how ephemeral it is, and how torturous. It asks what it takes to make an artist — and in particular, to make a great one. It’s about finding something that inspires you, even if it’s something no one else can see — which might well be a summation of Dieterle‘s early years at Warner Bros. It’s about sifting through the noise and the haze until you get to what is true: essentially Dieterle’s entire approach to filmmaking. Small wonder the subject matter touched him so deeply.
I suspect a whole lot of fans of Portrait of Jennie would take exception to Thomson labeling it a “women’s picture” — in part because that downplays its ambitions. But it’s also inaccurate because Portrait of Jennie is more his movie than hers. Oh, Jennie Appleton is unquestionably a great part for Jones, and she’s radiant, but as Dieterle shapes the film, Cotten has the pivotal role. (Selznick probably never saw that one coming.) Despite Jennie appearing and disappearing from Eben’s life, she’s the constant; he’s the variable. Her story is predetermined; his is still being written. Portrait of Jennie isn’t just a love story, or a tale of two worlds colliding. It’s a study of a pained and humbling spiritual journey; Eben Adams is as much a work in progress as the portrait of Jennie itself. The film takes that question so common to screen romances — what do we take away from a relationship? — and offers tangible proof of love’s transformative power. Jennie encourages Eben to forget the limitations of time and space (and not merely to forget them, but to scale them), then challenges him to put that knowledge to good use. That’s what sets it apart from other supernatural romances, like the previous year’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir — and it’s why audiences are so protective of the film; it speaks to them about their own potential. It’s about love transforming art, and art transcending love. And it’s about the talents that lie within each of us: how we ignite them, and how we choose to share them.
Dieterle completed his run of fifteen superlative films (culminating in five splendid romantic melodramas) with THE ACCUSED, a feminist response to the misogyny that overran the film industry in the 1940’s. The premise is what we now consider noir. Loretta Young’s psychology professor, Wilma Tuttle, is sexually assaulted by a student; in defending herself, she accidentally kills him. And then like so many noir protagonists, she’s left having to cover up her crime — and not merely cover it up, but lend her expertise to the investigation. But here’s the twist: before he died, her student penned a profile of his professor that’s likely to expose her: the sexually frustrated female of many a Forties flick (cf. Young’s own The Doctor Takes a Wife), who hides her fear of intimacy behind glasses she doesn’t need. Tuttle realizes that to avoid detection, she’ll need to forge a more outgoing persona, and though it starts out as a ruse, she soon grows comfortable in her own skin. She discovers she enjoys this new game of cat and mouse, toying with witnesses who don’t recognize her because she’s figuratively and literally let down her hair. In time she reclaims the upper hand that women on screen had routinely enjoyed a decade earlier.
The Accused is eager to expose how ’40s films have pigeon-holed women, and fittingly, screenwriter Ketti Frings lays the blame squarely at the feet of men. (The truck driver who picks up Tuttle on the side of the road after her assault sizes her up and senses she’s the victim of a date gone wrong — and holds her responsible.) The film’s two male leads — one of whom (Bob Cummings) ultimately wins her — ogle and leer at Tuttle as if it’s something women should not only be used to, but enjoy; when she dresses up for a dinner date, Cummings notes approvingly that her “brains don’t show.” It’s hard enough in this environment for a woman to get by. A woman in academia? She hasn’t got a chance. Small wonder that the professor has receded into a repressed version of herself; it’s an act of self-preservation. Frings’ screenplay not only explains why so many post-war women on screen have lost their sense of liberation, but makes it clear that no men are going to swoop in and save them; they’ll have to save themselves. (Although Frings receives the sole script credit, at least six other writers at Paramount had a hand in it, but it never feels like a hodgepodge; the touchups and rewrites result in energy, bite and an abundance of good lines.)
Professor Wilma Tuttle is the sort of restlessly conflicted character who plays to all of Dieterle’s strengths, and he makes wonderful use of the handheld camera to expose her inner torment. Tuttle’s student tags her as “cyclothymic” — what today we’d refer to as a mild form of bipolar disorder — and although it’s the student’s observation, and not Frings’, both Young and Dieterle seize upon it. (The two hadn’t worked together since Grand Slam and The Devil’s in Love in 1933; the film makes for an auspicious reunion.) Young fluctuates between periods of depression and fits of ecstasy and extraversion, and Dieterle manages to have a mirror forever positioned nearby, capturing her duality and duplicity. Together, they create a layered look at a functioning individual burdened not only by an incident beyond her control, but by insecurities that cloud her reasoning and offset her intelligence. The result is an extremely nuanced portrait for this sort of dark melodrama. (The Accused — adored by critics and audiences alike in 1949 — became a “late late show” staple in the ’50s before fading into obscurity. Happily it’s enjoyed a renaissance since its Blu-ray release in 2021.)
The Accused marks the end of an extraordinarily fertile period in Dieterle’s career: in the fifteen films from Blockade (1938) to The Accused (1949), he basks in an uncommon mastery and mash-up of genres. The nine films that follow are more hit or miss; none are awful, but only a handful are among Dieterle’s best. Most of the time Dieterle is giving his all, weighed down by a lackluster script or indifferent performances. It’s hard to imagine that the lessening quality of his offers — and the few films in which he seems more distracted than engaged — weren’t a result of his being singled out as a “premature anti-fascist” by the HUAC. (At one point, assigned an overseas shoot, his passport was held up for three months by the State Department, pending “investigation.” Who was going to hire him — or entrust him with an A-list film — after that?)
The film that followed The Accused, ROPE OF SAND, is a movie many like more than me. (It got great notices and did strong business in 1949.) Dieterle and cinematographer Charles Lang — ably abetted by art director Franz Bachelin — make the most of the South African desert setting. The script from Walter Doniger wonders which is more effective: mental manipulation or physical torture — and the answer is often sadistic fun, with Paul Henreid and Claude Rains competing for scenery-chewing honors. But there’s a hollowness at its core. Burt Lancaster (as a hunting guide who — two years earlier — stumbled on a diamond lode) had no desire to do the film and, by his own admission, pretty much phoned it in — and it shows. He trusts he can get by on charisma alone, and the charisma helps — but the hurt and hunger that had distinguished his performance in Criss Cross that same year would’ve come in mighty handy. (When he recalls his last trip to the region — which culminated in heat prostration, degradation and persecution — then announces, “The pain won’t leave,” his voice betrays so little emotion, he might as well be relating the tale of how he stubbed his big toe.) As for the actress hired to make her screen debut opposite him — Wallis discovery Corinne Calvet — her instincts are sound, but her technique is vague and clumsy. And you don’t get a great film when you take an actress who is still learning to ply her trade and put her opposite an actor refusing to ply his.
PAID IN FULL taps into what critic Dave Fiore memorably called Dieterle’s “feverish interiority,” and it’s got the sort of role at which Lizabeth Scott excelled: a decent woman who can’t see the hole she’s digging herself into. Dieterle almost pulls off a highly engaging film about a sister‘s sacrifice, then the last 15 minutes deteriorate into a series of high-pitched, high-speed soap clichés that strain credulity. (It’s a mark of how bad Charles Schnee’s screenplay is that even though it’s based on a true story, you still don’t believe a word of it. ) But Scott was never more winning onscreen, never freer nor more expressive — which is something you can’t say about her in her next film with Dieterle, DARK CITY. Here Charlton Heston is a veteran who — unable to leave his wartime disillusions behind — has gotten mired in the easy corruption of New York City. Closed off to possibilities, he treats everyone with the same derision with which he views himself — and that includes the lady who’s carrying a torch for him (Scott). Dark City is a directorial tour de force; Dieterle sustains a level of tension that isn’t anywhere to be found in the screenplay. What he can’t salvage, uncommonly, is the love story. Scott is clingy to the point of being pitiful; Heston is uncaring to the point of being cruel. As much as you’d like to place all the blame on the scenarists, Dieterle doesn’t help matters. If only Scott brushed off one of Heston’s rebuffs with an healthy laugh, if only Heston — even while admitting he’s incapable of reciprocating her affection — threw Scott an appreciative smile, then you might see the possibilities for true romance. But those moments never come. At the end of the film, you can almost buy into Heston’s new lease on life — but you still haven’t a clue how Scott fits in. If you can overlook the ineffectiveness of the love story, Dieterle puts on a great show — but what an odd thing to have to overlook in a Dieterle film.
The 1951 Western RED MOUNTAIN feels unlike Dieterle, too — but through no fault of his own. It’s a handsome Technicolor production, and it’s hard to see how the location shooting or the action sequences could be better. But there’s a whole lot of incident masquerading as plot — the script keeps short-changing things like character consistency and growth, and the lines don’t support the kind of nuance for which Dieterle is known. There’s a strong story at its core — of a hardened soldier (Alan Ladd) forced to reassess his fallacies about war and his delusions about heroes — but it’s never properly dramatized; you can practically feel Dieterle and Ladd aching for a scene or two that they can sink their teeth into. The screenplay is by John Meredyth Lucas, who also did Dark City. Hal Wallis loved him enough to keep hiring him — but he was the kind of writer who started strong, then seemed incapable of bringing a story to a satisfying conclusion — which is true of his third film with Dieterle as well, PEKING EXPRESS.
The first forty minutes of Peking Express (set en route to — then on board — a train out of Shanghai) boast some of Dieterle’s most memorable compositions. Dieterle, Lang and art director Hal Pereira forge scenes of claustrophobic beauty and intrigue. Then the story meanders off on some other, less interesting route, and even Dieterle can’t seem to connect the dots. It’s Paramount’s second (loose) remake of the 1932 classic Shanghai Express, and it gets knocked for not living up to the original — but the comparisons miss the point; Peking Express is a totally different beast: an exposé of the tensions simmering in the newly-emerged People's Republic of China. The blame lies in Lucas‘s inability to tell a story without reverting to reams of exposition and increasingly improbable scenarios. To Dieterle’s credit, he makes this first piece of screen propaganda about the evils of Red China gratifyingly free of bombast and bluster, granting even the most mercenary characters an unusual level of dignity. On the debit side, Peking Express features the only Joseph Cotten performance I’ve seen that left me unimpressed. He seems at home as a UN doctor stationed in China, committed to saving patients regardless of political affiliation — but when he’s forced to rescue the passengers of a hijacked train by grabbing a gun and firing off shots with uncanny accuracy, it seems like a stretch. He plays a confident doctor who becomes a reluctant warrior — but one of the oddities of cinema is that it probably would’ve worked better the other way around: with an actor who didn’t quite convince as a man of medicine, but came into their own as an action hero. (Happily, co-star Calvet has improved since Rope of Sand. She’s looser and more varied, and she takes a great slap near the end.)
But if Cotten fails to convince in Peking Express, he’s magnificent opposite Joan Fontaine in SEPTEMBER AFFAIR: Dieterle’s last great exploration of the human heart. September Affair challenges the age-old belief that “true love” makes everything right. It’s about the lies we tell ourselves to avoid facing our responsibilities, and the selfish behavior we struggle to rationalize. Joan Fontaine is concert pianist Manina Stewart; Joseph Cotten is married businessman David Lawrence. They meet at an airport in Italy when their flight to the U.S. is delayed, and decide to explore some of the sights they haven’t had a chance to see. When they subsequently miss their flight, they decide to stay on a few more days — and when they learn that their plane went down in a crash, and their names are listed among the fatalities, they have a singular decision to make. Do they return to the U.S. to face the lives they loathe, or do they stay in Italy and start a new life together?
The film needs to convince you that their decision to stay on — to let friends and family believe they’re dead — is just as defensible as they convince themselves it is. And it does; it seduces you just as neatly as it does them. There are breathtaking shots of Italy in the early ’50s — scenic views that no sane person would ever want to leave — but the film doesn’t need them. It all comes down to one early scene in a café, in which the two of them — long before they enter into any kind of romance — are intrigued by their ability to speak so candidly to a stranger. Half a world away from the admiring fans who’ve denied her any sense of privacy, Manina is thrilled to have the attention of just one interested party. And David — whose face radiates equal parts resilience and pain — is delighted to have someone so impressive and attractive seeking his attention. The restaurant where they’re sipping Chianti has a stack of American albums, and Manina chooses to play Walter Huston’s 1944 recording of “September Song.” In one of the most striking sequences Dieterle ever committed to film, they listen to the song in its entirety, in silence. Manina is seated at a table, occasionally nodding her head — struck by both its musical beauty (which she understands so readily) and the poignancy and aptness of the lyric; David, standing by the victrola, never takes his eyes off her. Something magical happens in those few minutes: something unspoken and not yet readily understood. But when it comes time to say goodbye to their old lives, you grasp from that one scene alone what it is they’ve been lacking and what they think they’re looking for. It’s classic Dieterle. Every look, every gesture is underscored with precision, but done so delicately, you’re unaware of the hand of the director guiding you along, steering your responses.
In Dieterle’s best films — in most of them, in fact — when you get to the end, you understand exactly how you’ve arrived. The trip made sense; even if the script didn’t make the journey as clear as you might’ve wished, Dieterle was able to fill in the blanks. He knew how to accentuate the key points needed to guide you comfortably to your destination. And so it is with September Affair. Because of Dieterle, the rueful ending doesn’t seem dictated by the demands of the Hays Office. It doesn’t feel like Manina and David had an affair and needed to be punished. Their decision to return to their former lives seems to spring from character — from a shared acknowledgment that a move that once felt so very right was perhaps not carefully considered. Their honeymoon didn’t last long; we saw it coming before they did. Early, Manina describes David as someone who needs to take a step back — as one would a painting — to get a better look at himself. Dieterle grants us the same opportunity; he allows us an overview that the characters themselves lack. (The villa they rent in Italy seems huge, but once they move in, we watch it grow somehow constricted. Their luggage went down with the plane, but their metaphorical baggage moved in with them — and is crowding them out.) One is running out of fear, the other out of frustration. They’re taking the easy way out. If only Fontaine and Cotten were a little stronger, they would’ve made different decisions. And ultimately, September Affair — a peek into a possible future posing as a love story — is about making them stronger.
While doing location shooting on September Affair, Dieterle received an intriguing offer. Filmmaker Roberto Rossellini was due to start on a new project with his mistress Anna Magnani, but instead he threw her over for Ingrid Bergman. Magnani set up shop with a different production company some 40 miles away from where Rossellini was shooting, commissioned a script — and Dieterle was invited to direct. Although he later told The New York Times that conditions “could hardly have been more primitive ….. except for the mechanical equipment we took with us, we had to construct everything we needed with our own hands,” he proved an inspired choice to helm; he forges something midway between Hollywood melodrama and Italian neorealism — and Magnani rewards him with one of her greatest performances as Maddalena, a Naples prostitute forced by authorities to return to her home island of VULCANO. (Determined to redeem herself by saving her younger sister from a similar fate, Maddalena takes the law into her own hands, in a scene that’s one of Magnani’s most powerful.) Separate versions were shot for the Italian and English markets (shades of Dieterle’s earliest experiences at Warner Bros.); they vary greatly in plot and resolution. Although I personally favor the Italian version for its uncensored, unapologetic look at Maddalena’s fate, there’s also something to be said for the version that American censors insisted upon before its premiere — three years later — in the States. For the U.S. version, the filmmakers tend to the love story, which was not a priority in the original — and in some ways, once you see the uncompromising, explosive ending of the Italian original, it’s charming to see how the story looks wrapped up with a neat, sweet bow, with its young lovers sailing off into the Aeolian sunset. Underwritten by a foreign production company, Vulcano doesn’t exactly fall under my criterion of “Hollywood films,” but coming so soon after the crest of Dieterle’s career — and buoyed by such a singular directorial approach and a dynamic star turn — it’s too good not to mention.
As noted, the years 1949 through 1951 were full of distractions and disappointments. But two back-to-back films in 1952 — both with William Holden — got Dieterle defiantly back on track. Since the mid-’30s, studios had been addicted to films about horse racing. Joel McCrea gave the setting a screwball twist in He Married His Wife, while Betty Grable witnessed The Day the Bookies Wept. Barbara Stanwyck bid farewell to comedy in The Bride Wore Boots, while Ava Gardner gave her career a boost when She Went to the Races. Poverty Row practically pitched a tent at the track (Heart of Virginia, Pride of Maryland, Blue Grass of Kentucky). Oh, there was the occasional winner (National Velvet) and some solid contenders (The Story of Sea Biscuit, My Brother Talks to Horses), but only one film depicted life at the track the way it was: BOOTS MALONE.
It’s not another film that speaks to the beauty and majesty of horses: to the race track professionals — from the owners to the breeders to the riders — they’re a means to an end. (Holden advises a newcomer, “A race horse is a dumb brute. The intelligence has been bred out of him. All he respects is your strength.”) Holden is an agent whose career died when his jockey did, but he continues to haunt the track. When a teenage kid wanders in with wide-eyed notions about racing (he won medals for horsemanship at the academy he’s run away from, and carries a wad of hundred-dollar bills in his pocket), Boots sizes him up as an easy mark and offers to train him. The script takes pains not to go soft; this is a clearheaded, unsentimental look at the cutthroat methods you have to employ to get along and get ahead. (“There’s no such thing as loyalty,” Boots cautions his young charge: “Not at the racetrack.”) The script by producer Milton Holmes — himself a racing enthusiast — presumes the audiences will be interested not only in the gambles and the swindles, but in the tinest of details: how to sit on a horse in the starting gate, how to switch the whip from one hand to the other — and he’s right. And Dieterle gives it a gritty look; having seen his share of horse films that flirted with cliché (including Holmes’s own Sally O’Rourke), he provides Boots with an atypical air of authenticity.
But Dieterle’s romantic instincts don’t desert him. Although Boots has been treating his new charge like a mere meal ticket for most of the film, something changes when the boy has to register for an upcoming race and — unwilling to provide his own last name — uses Boots’. That night, while everyone sleeps in the stable where they’ve been training for months, Boots sits restless. Something has touched him — something he didn’t see coming. The film’s bright visual surface gives way to a scene awash in shadow, and we fasten on Boots’ face, his eyes glistening with unfallen tears, his heart fairly bursting with pain and longing. He senses it, then recovers — reinstating the chip on his shoulder that Holden wore so well. (Everyone sees through his cynicism, but no one calls him on it. They all understand it’s his way of speaking from the heart.) It’s a brief moment, but an indelible one. Dieterle lets the character lower his guard just long enough to reveal how much he has riding on the upcoming race. He raises the stakes in a matter of seconds.
Boots Malone is a Dieterle pic I enjoy (very much) even though I don’t see as much of Dieterle in it as in most of his classic films. His next film — his last great one — is Dieterle through and through. In the late ’40s, the federal government became determined to combat the growing influence of organized crime, and so the five-member Kefauver committee was formed to investigate the issue. The televised hearings in early 1951 were seen by over 30 million Americans; even children were let home early from school to watch. It was inevitable that Hollywood would seek to ape the hearings and their findings, and over the next five years, nearly two dozen films resulted — the best of these being THE TURNING POINT.
Here, special prosecutor John Conroy (Edmond O’Brien, in one of his best screen performances) returns to his Midwestern hometown to head up anti-crime commission. His primary goal: mob boss, Neil Eichelberger (Ed Begley), who hides his criminal activities behind a legitimate trucking business. John is accompanied by his assistant and girlfriend Amanda (Alexis Smith, in a performance as good as anything she’d done in a decade), a socialite with a social conscience, and challenged and prodded by his boyhood pal Jerry McKibbon (Holden), a newspaper man who knows all the angles and wonder if his friend has what it takes to take out the mob. There’s a “slow and steady wins the race” aspect to The Turning Point that, on paper, sounds conventional, but that turns out to be subversive. The one who prides himself on being a cynic proves so naïve he gets a friend killed; the one derided as an innocent does his job in such a plainspoken, thorough and honest manner, he gets results. And the mob boss who thinks he’s in control — who’s convinced he’s untouchable — is the first to crack.
Dieterle maintains a tight grip on the proceedings, with superb aid from cinematographer Milton Krasner. (They had honed their collaboration on The Accused.) In the first half, when Conroy is controlling the narrative, the film plays as a superbly acted and directed crime drama. But once Eichelberger appears before the committee, and his hands start to shake, and his ears begin to burn, he realizes he needs to take deadly steps to cover up information that might come to light. The others — not just his underlings, but his pursuers — get caught up in his panic and paranoia, and Dieterle and Krasner adjust the look to reflect the desperation on display. Shadows engulf the screen, the angles grow decidedly Dutch — and what was “merely” a crime drama becomes a noir: a noir filled with formidable set pieces. It begins with the torching of an apartment complex that leaves blackened corpses in the street and ends with a hired assassin stalking his prey from the catwalk of a boxing arena — and in between are clandestine meetings in narrow coffee shops and chases up spiral staircases and down darkened hallways. It’s as if the crime boss’s declining mental state induces the noir elements, affirming that noir is — more than anything — a state of mind.
The Turning Point turned a tidy profit for Paramount (and strangely, proved the studio’s biggest sleeper of the decade in Australia). And then it was really the end. Assignments proved almost impossible to come by. Dieterle made only four more films before returning to Germany; MAGIC FIRE, a biopic about Richard Wagner — into which Republic Studios head Herbert Yates poured every possible resource in order to give his studio an air of responsibility (as Warner Bros. had done with A Midsummer Night’s Dream nearly two decades earlier) — is easily the best of the bunch. The performances are excellent, the location shooting lovely, the emotional beats clear, and the excerpts from various Wagnerian operas splendid. But nearly an hour was excised from the final print prior to release, and what remains — as with the decimated Madame Du Barry — is maddeningly hard to follow. The story keeps promising to go places that never materialize. But it’s a solid effort, a collaboration that — had the full film survived and the print (in inglorious Trucolor, which has decayed badly) been cleaned up — might have stacked up with Dieterle’s best biopics.
ELEPHANT WALK, too, showed that Dieterle still had what it took to tell a great story — there’s just no great story to tell. John Lee Mahin’s adaptation of Robert Standish’s novel — in which an English bride takes up residence with her husband at his tea plantation in Ceylon — is almost startling in its inconsistency and incoherence. Elizabeth Taylor frequently looks as lost as her character; her onscreen husband Peter Finch goes through a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation twenty minutes in; Taylor and Dana Andrews (as the proverbial “other man”) have no discernible chemistry; and the other planters (with whom Finch passes his time playing drunken indoor polo on bikes: toxic masculinity that Mahin tries to pass off as hallowed tradition) are so unaware of the rules of basic etiquette, they come off like an alien species. Dieterle stages a stunning production — making the plantation at once lavish, mystical and defiantly dangerous. He only worked in Technicolor five times, and this is the best; each hue seems chosen not merely to seduce the senses, but to clarify, anticipate or heighten the mood. Shooting began with Vivian Leigh in the lead role, but she suffered a breakdown, and Taylor stepped in. Location work had already been completed, so there are unfortunate instances where eye-catching scenery bleeds into rather obvious rear projection — but it doesn’t detract much from the brilliance of the visual conception. Dieterle aims for an epic — but he can’t do much with characters whose behavior doesn’t make fundamental sense, and actors who seem to know it.
Dieterle’s final Hollywood film, 1957’s OMAR KHAYYAM, defeats him, but you don’t blame him. The script is void of conflict, and lead Cornel Wilde is miscast. It’s the dullest film of his 53 Hollywood efforts — an absolute chore to sit through, despite striking performances by Michael Rennie, Joan Taylor and John Derek (who would have been far more charismatic in the title role). But somehow, the borefest that is Omar Khayyam is not nearly as painful as the film Dieterle might’ve saved, but didn’t: SALOME (1953). Harry Cohn greenlighted it to reignite Rita Hayworth’s career — despite her disinterest — knowing she was a decade too old for the title role. Costar Charles Laughton (as her stepfather King Herod) was incensed by Cohn’s frequent interference, and costar Stewart Granger (as her love interest Claudius) was put off by Laughton’s frequent upstaging. And the script hobbled together by Hollywood mainstay Jesse Lasky Jr. and relative newcomer Harry Kleiner — despite its clever efforts to reconcile the two versions of Salome referenced in the Bible — barely rose above the pedestrian. Dieterle was working against formidable odds. But that doesn’t explain how he let British stage star and Hollywood newcomer Alan Badel give such a maniacal performance as John the Baptist. (The actor triumphed two years later as Richard Wagner, capturing the rigors of being both voluptuary and visionary; here he makes the gift of prophecy look like a wide-eyed parlor trick.) It doesn’t explain why the color schemes (which Dieterle had micromanaged with great success on Kismet) seem arbitrary, or why the second-unit team captures a sense of unease that eludes the film as a whole. There’s a scene midway through where Salome interrogates Claudius about John the Baptist, during which Dieterle uses Salome’s antagonism — and Claudius’s deference — to strengthen their bond. On paper, it's dry and factual, but Dieterle seizes upon it to solidify the characters’ chemistry. It’s the sort of thing he did better than just about any of his contemporaries — but it’s one of the few spots where you see what he’s capable of.
Salome has long been characterized as “camp,” but that designation does an injustice to Laughton’s performance. Playing a king consumed by fear, Laughton seems at first all twitches and affectations, but you come to realize the actor is armed with a plan; when Salome dances for him, all the mincing mannerisms that had defined him fall away. Being bewitched by his stepdaughter fills him with renewed vigor; his lust sets him free. (If you’re looking for camp, Laughton gave a hammier performance in The Big Clock.) The actor is in command of his overriding arc; it’s the modulations that are missing. We watch as Laughton and Judith Anderson (as Queen Herodius) engage in an increasingly strained relationship, but we rarely get a glimpse of the desire that once made their pairing seem inescapable, or the despair that it’s vanished; nuance — Dieterle’s strong suit — is in short supply. We see Salome’s protectiveness towards her mother turn to revulsion — but the loss of that crucial link to her past doesn’t seem to hit Hayworth very hard. Dieterle’s compositions are as elegant as ever, but emotionally, he seems disengaged — and so do his characters. At one point during Hayworth’s famous “dance of the seven veils,” Dieterle cuts to soldiers in the palace plotting an escape, or preventing an escape, or searching for John the Baptist. It’s hard to know what they’re doing. It’s a random action scene inserted so we know “something’s afoot”: the sort of empty ploy that’s so beneath Dieterle that it prompts a more visceral response than anything else in the film. Salome isn’t a low point for biblical epics; hell, it’s not even in the bottom half. But it’s a strange low for Dieterle; he had embraced so many less promising properties, it’s hard to say why he held this one at arm’s length.
And so I’m ending on a down note. And that’s not inappropriate; Dieterle’s Hollywood tenure ended on a down note. But as noted, the gratifying thing about Dieterle’s career is how it’s been so recently reassessed — and how his former glory is being restored. Even if you merely peruse IMDb’s “customer reviews,” you see a marked change in the perception of Dieterle over the last decade, as audiences get a sense of his full body of work, and wonder at the variety, achievement and consistency. They’ve come to see how his reputation has been damaged by presumptions made decades after his films were released — presumptions that, when they were made, there was no way of discounting, but that have proven to be untrue: that his financial failures were artistically unsound; that his most acclaimed films contained his most representative work; and that because he wasn’t drawn to a particular genre — or more accurately, because he was adept at so many — he didn’t have a recognizable style or aesthetic. Review by review, you see IMDb and Letterboxd customers feeling a need to right a wrong, to ensure that Dieterle regains the recognition he once enjoyed.
Bloggers and online critics have proven crucial in this respect. In her recent write-up of This Love of Ours, Moira Finnie notes, “William Dieterle, despite his skilled work on such classics of romance as Love Letters, Portrait of Jennie and September Affair, almost never appears to receive credit for his handling of intimate and delicate scenes conveying an emotional affinity between characters.” (She nails his particular gift for “weaving a colorful but believable tapestry out of some outlandish elements.”) Adriano Vasconcelos, in praise of September Affair in 2021, insists, “William Dieterle stands to me as a director who seldom fails. His quality touch, professionalism and capacity to extract great work from his leads and camera directors is unsurpassable.” Check out Marc Fusion on The Crash or Nora MacIntyre on The White Angel or Patrick O’Neill on The Devil’s in Love for recent reappraisals of forgotten Dieterle films, or José Arroyo at Notes on Film, whose 2020 look at Dark City expertly details how Dieterle’s visual command contributes not only to the film’s visceral power, but to establishing newcomer Charlton Heston as a star. But perhaps film critic Michael Barrett, who applauds Dieterle’s “protean mastery,” puts it best in his 2022 review of the Blu-ray release of The Turning Point: “German émigré Dieterle was one of Hollywood's most reliable and prolific stylists, excellent with actors and atmosphere. He's never quite gotten his due, perhaps because instead of flourishing a strong ‘personality,’ he submerges himself in every genre and mode, from the lushest and extravagant to the most modest and efficient.”
Newer publications, too, have begun to set the record straight. In his latest edition of The Rough Guide to Film, Richard Armstrong argues that “despite earlier commercial success,” Dieterle might best be viewed now as “one of Hollywood's greatest lost romantics.” Had he not been censured in the late ‘40s, Armstrong suggests — quite accurately, I think — that Dieterle “could have excelled with the lush spectacles favoured by 1950s Hollywood as an antidote to television.” Longtime critic Leonard Maltin rallies to Dieterle’s side in his newest Movie Encyclopedia, urging for a reassessment: “He was responsible for a good many meritorious films that have yet to receive the praise they're due, among them his poignant yet melodramatic ‘lost generation’ saga The Last Flight, his masterful production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and especially the dazzling The Devil and Daniel Webster.” And TCM described him thus, a mere two months ago: “With his knack for fluid camera movement and expressive, graceful visuals, and an ability to work with actors that was informed by his own acting background, Dieterle quickly climbed the ranks at Warner Bros. to become one of the studio’s top house directors.” To the network most dedicated to film preservation and history, he left a legacy as “one of the more underrated filmmakers who revolutionized Hollywood.”
Want more? If so, I take a look here at all the films Errol Flynn did for Warner Bros. between 1935 to 1950: from his first starring role in Captain Blood to the termination of his contract after Rocky Mountain. I delve into Margaret Sullavan and her 16 films here. I serve up The 10 Best Screwball Comedies here, and The 25 Best Film Noirs here, and some of the titles are sure to surprise you. My other essays are all about TV, past and present, but if you take to TV as much as film, there's an index of the more than 100 TV essays I've written; you might see something you like, be it a drama series or a sitcom or one of my “best of” lists.
Oh my word, Tommy – you’ve done some pretty ambitious essays, but this takes the cake. I’ve only done a quick skim, but just wanted to say congratulations to you – and what an undertaking. Will definitely follow up once I’ve had a thorough read. Just a quick FYI: Love Letters is one of Clark’s favorite films, had we discussed that? It’s to him what Now Voyager is to me: comfort food. So although I can’t promise he’ll read the whole essay, at least not right away – law school is clobbering him – I know he’ll want to see what you wrote about that film.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, you just love slaughtering sacred cows, don’t you? I can’t remember what you wrote recently that was so contrary to popular consensus that I told you you should probably run for cover. LOL You making mincemeat of the auteur theory is something I didn’t see coming. Not that I disagree with you; I’ve always found it stupid. And although I’m not entirely convinced by your correlation between the dismissal of Dieterle over the years and the “inanities” (your word) of the auteur theory, I understand where you’re coming from. Sarris and his cronies had an unbelievable amount of influence in the 60s (and when Sarris got something wrong, he got it very wrong). And yet they did define film criticism for a generation – except, of course, for the iconoclasts like Kael.
As I said, I’ll return once I’ve had a thorough read, but I wanted to mention one thing. Maybe you touch upon it here. One thing that’s always struck me about Dieterle is how good he is with actors. Male actors. And not in that macho way that some directors are. I would say the two best performances David Manners gave were in Last Flight and Man Wanted. I find him hard to take elsewhere. And I think the same is true for Bob Cummings. Is he ever better than in The Accused and Paid in Full? It’s funny: we have that thing we called “women’s directors,” like Cukor (although I’ve always felt that making Cukor the prime example of a women’s director sort of reeked of homophobia). I’ve always been impressed with the nuance Dieterle gets out of his *male* actors – and maybe being an actor himself, he knew exactly how to handle them. And to extract a sensitivity that you don’t see elsewhere. It’s true of Muni in Pasteur and Ahearne in Juarez and pretty much everything Joseph Cotten did with Dieterle. I’m actually less a Joseph Cotten fan than most people, but I think Dieterle brought out a vulnerability that often eluded him. (I’m the only person who finds him stiff in Magnificent Ambersons.) Am I right in thinking that all of the acting nominations on Dieterle films were for male actors?
I had no idea about Clark and 'Love Letters.' It’s one of those films I could watch endlessly, and Philip likes it so much that he patiently puts up with me. Of the Dieterle romances, Philip prefers 'Portrait of Jennie' — and it’s hard to make a logical case that 'Love Letters' is better, but sometimes, of course, logic has nothing to do with why you love a film. 'Love Letters' just gets to me. I suspect it’s the same for Clark.
DeleteI hadn’t thought about all of the male actors who secured Oscar nods under Dieterle. I’m sure it was his own acting skills shaping their performances, and applying a certain amount of humility rather than bombast. The one exception: Jennifer Jones did get a nod for 'Love Letters.' I know folks who absolutely loathe that performance: finding her cloying and precious. I think the way she balances the light and the dark is remarkable; it may be my favorite of all her performances.
Totally agree about Cummings. Such an awful reputation, but in his two Dieterle films, he's excellent. In 'The Accused' in particular, his realization of what Wilma has done — and his ensuing efforts to protect her — are a good part of what makes the final third so compelling.
I finished reading yesterday, and meant to write last night, but the evening got away from me. First of all, I saw your note below about the friend who studied with Sarris, and what Sarris said about the auteur theory taking on a life of its own, and his regret at being hard on some really fine directors. Fascinating to get that perspective after all these years. He sort of opened a bottle and couldn’t get the genie back in! And I see what you mean below about what films Sarris would’ve remembered and had access to when he dismissed Dieterle in the 60s. You’re right: it probably would’ve been things like Zola and Juarez, and although I’m fond of Juarez like you, I don’t think those are the films that best define him. Or that fully define him.
DeleteSarris probably had a very limited view of Dieterle at that time (before Last Flight had been rediscovered, and before Devil and Daniel Webster had been restored and before Portrait of Jennie has been reassessed), and went to town with it. It’s unfortunate. But also, as you say, it’s heartening that the perspective is changing. It certainly has for me in the last 20 years, as Warner Bros. has begun releasing more of their early films, and as so many of Dieterle’s later films have cropped up as well. I never had a negative view of him, he just wasn’t on my radar much. But all the releases in the last 15 years or so have broadened and increased my appreciation. I think if you told me as little as a decade ago that you were doing a giant essay on William Dieterle, I would have thought it wasn’t worth the effort. But now having seen so many of these films, it’s very much worth the effort – and truly, Tommy, you do it brilliantly. It’s a fantastic piece on an undervalued director.
I don’t want to “make my way through your essay” like you make your way through his films - that would be rather pretentious of me, wouldn’t it? - but I especially enjoyed your descriptions of The Crash (which I have not seen, though I love Chatterton), of Midsummer (so many delicious behind-the-scenes details I knew nothing about), Devil and Daniel Webster (I love how you tied it into your feelings about Crowther, which - as we’ve discussed - I share).
DeleteAnd especially The Searching Wind, a prophetic film that no one seems to know. It’s another film where I think Dieterle coaxes a sensitive performance out of an actor; I don’t think I’ve ever liked Robert Young more. He’s not quite up to the dictation scene near the end, but I think he’s effective everywhere else – and especially in the opening and closing. And what a gorgeous film. As you say, the opulence is the point. Though I haven’t seen the film in a while, the moment when they’re all sitting at the dinner table, and the death of Mussolini is announced on the radio, and Dieterle swings from reaction shot to reaction shot - the five of them in that giant dining room, their lives both unaffected yet altered in some very profound way — has always haunted me. Dieterle makes it clear that that moment is huge in a way we don’t yet understand. He justifies the giant flashback to come. It’s what you discuss in your essay, and expertly - that he was a screenwriter’s best friend. He knew how to make their material even better.
This is the War & Peace of Tommy’s essays. Brava!
ReplyDeleteWhen I realized this was going to be about William Dieterle, I was a bit taken aback. This was not because I hold any disdain for the man, but because I truly never gave him much thought.
And as someone who is one of those film bros who read the work of Sarris as a young teenager when I wanted to be a lover of auteur cinema, I can totally admit someone like Dieterle was not someone I looked upon as “canon”.
Having said that, I did acknowledge him as an underrated director and someone who did show more flair than many of his contemporaries. I just think I was always viewed him as lesser compared to his other German contemporaries like Murnau or Lang.
I feel like the biggest films I think of for him are, indeed, Hunchback, but also Midsummer. I suppose Emile Zola too but that’s more just because of the Oscar hoopla.
I do have to admit he’s very good at adapting well to various genres. In some ways, I used to put him in the same group as the likes of Victor Fleming or Howard Hawks though those too were far more bombastic.
“The War & Peace of Tommy’s essays” is pretty much accurate. If I ever start to write anything longer, please just shoot me. This was supposed to be The 10 Best Dieterle Films, but I couldn’t limit it down, so it became the 20 Best, and then the 25 – and finally, I thought, let me just take on his entire Hollywood output. Because there was hardly a film I didn’t want to say something about. I confess, even with the directors I love the most, I would say I’m indifferent to maybe 25 to 30% of their output. And I think that’s normal. Not everybody hits a home run each time at bat. But there’s something about Dieterle’s approach — his delicacy, his restraint, his ability to zero in on the emotional core of a film — that wins me over, and makes me forgiving of even his lesser works. Exactly as you say, he’s not bombastic like Fleming or Hawks; when I think they’re missing the mark, I find them very hard to take. Whereas with Dieterle, even with a minor film like a Peking Express or This Love of Ours, if I tune in, I’m rarely tempted to turn out. He aims straight for the heart; in film, as in theatre, those are the works I most respond to.
DeleteSarris was pretty brutal where Dieterle was concerned. There are a lot of reasons I don’t like Sarris, and that’s certainly one. (I think when he came out with his seminal American Cinema in 1968, he listed Dieterle under “Miscellany.”) But in Sarris’s defense, at that time Dieterle was best remembered for the films that had garnered Oscar attention, and those was the biopics — ironically, the films that played least to his strengths. And of course, Dieterle’s legacy further faltered because — as a film director who was on no one’s radar — studios weren’t quick to release his films to home video. It’s really only since 2000 or so that the majority of his work has been released — just in the last decade Syncopation in 2015, The Crash in 2019, Dark City in 2020, The Devil and Daniel Webster and The Accused in 2021, The Turning Point in 2022 — and as audiences discover more and more of his work, you can see a palpable change in the way he’s viewed. That’s been awfully nice to see.
Ooh, and a quick P.S. Do you knows Love Letters? If not, you need to watch. Part of the premise, as I allude to, is that Jennifer Jones suffers a trauma and loses her memory — and reverts to a simpler, younger, more innocent version of herself. Sound familiar? She doesn’t go work as a waitress in Shula, Tennessee, but still, when I first watched Love Letters, I couldn’t help but think of Knots Landing Season 6. And knowing what a classic film buff Richard Gollance was — this is the season, of course, that has nods to The Little Foxes and Ikuru — I really wouldn’t be surprised if he conceived the whole Val/Verna plotline with Love Letters in mind.
DeleteOh I’ve definitely seen Love Letters! I think I’ve seen about 7-8 of his films total.
DeleteBut I do bet that there is some truth that Gollance was heavily influenced by it.
I know I have seen the following:
DeleteThe Life of Emile Zola
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Story of Louis Pasteur
Midsummer Night's Dream
Love Letters
The Devil & Daniel Webster
Madame Du Barry
Kismet
I think that is it. I might've possibly seen a couple more that I just simply don't remember anymore.
I think you’d remember if you’d seen ‘Portrait of Jennie’; I highly recommend it. Knowing you as I do, I’d be curious to see what you make of an early Warner Bros. Dieterle like ‘Man Wanted’ or ‘From Headquarters’; a better biopic like ‘Juarez’ or ‘Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet’; and a great noir like ‘The Accused.’ ‘Syncopation’ is a one-of-a-kind film, and I know it is not too many people’s tastes, but Philip and I both love it. As a musician, I’d be curious to know what you think. I think all of these films are available on Prime Video.
DeleteI will definitely check those out! I am hoping to get back into the swing of watching older movies I missed as we go into next year!
DeleteTommy, you actually caught me on a day when I had time to read this. It’s monumental. I knew of your affection for some other underrated directors, like Leusen and Mamoulian, but I had no idea you had such passion for Dieterle. I know so little of his work, but thanks to you, I’m compiling a very long list. I know his 40s films best, and agree with you on Devil and Daniel Webster, Love Letters, Portrait of Jenny and The Accused (which I checked out after you published your film noir essay). I don’t know his 30s work at all, although I watched Emile Zola a few months ago when it was on TCM, and was not too impressed. It amused me to see that neither were you! If you don’t mind giving me a few shortcuts, which 30s films of his are most accessible? I definitely have to look up Syncopation, because obviously it’s right up my alley. Easy to find?
ReplyDelete*Leisen, not Leusen. Someday I’ll respond to one of your posts and not have an autocorrect error…
DeleteDonna, it's always lovely to hear from you, and forgive me, I'm going to make this quick, and write more once I've gone back into my notes of "what I found where." But 'Syncopation' is on Prime Video, and yes, as a musician, I think you'll love it. It's one of Philip's favorites. A whole bunch of his early '50s works are now on Prime -- it surprised me how many, because they weren't there just a few years ago: 'Peking Express,' 'Dark City,' 'The Turning Point,' among others. And a lot of his early '30s works are now out on DVD -- they're frequently in sets with other films, so prices can be steep -- but of his pre-Midsummer period, I know 'The Last Flight,' 'Her Majesty, Love,' 'The Crash' and 'Man Wanted' are on DVD (as well as 'Lawyer Man' and 'Jewel Robbery,' which I don't care for as much, although some feel the latter is a classic). I'll shoot you more info once I check my notes. :)
DeleteI didn’t know there were so many of his films I haven’t seen — my movie viewing schedule is now fille!!
ReplyDeleteEnjoy! The wonderful thing is how much of his work is readily available, whereas it wasn’t just a decade ago. Quite a few of his films turned up on TCM while I was researching this article. Many more are available for streaming on Prime Video. And the only one I couldn’t find anywhere available for streaming was still available on DVD, which was his second film, Her Majesty, Love.
DeleteTommy, this looks magnificent. I say "looks," because I have to catch a plane for Chicago later today (for a musicology conference) and can only skim right now. But I know I'll dig into it with pleasure later on.
ReplyDeleteI'm not that familiar with his work, either, so there's a lot for me to get to know. I've seen a handful, but the two I know best are "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (which I first saw, under that title I think, at a rep cinema in DC in 1971) and "Midsummer Night's Dream." I have the latter on DVD in a box with other Shakespeare, and I've come to prize it more and more.
As my movie-history awareness came from Pauline Kael more than anyone else, I always tended to roll my eyes at the "auteur theory" as espoused by Sarris at that time. Kael of course eviscerated it (and him) in that essay preserved in her first book, and he never forgave her for it -- he was even unable to be civil when writing about her death. But she was right of course: at that period the phrase meant something far more specific than "in movies the director is important," which (as Kael often said later) every movie fan knows. Anyway, I'm glad to have my attention drawn to Dieterle like this, and I know I'll be savoring your words this evening, once I'm checked into my hotel room.
Oh -- and "Portrait of Jennie," which I first saw just a couple of years ago and went out of my mind for... rather unexpectedly, as it contains elements that I can be allergic to under other circumstances.
DeleteI was so hoping you’d see the essay, Jon. I thought it might be right up your alley, and had no idea how familiar you were with Dieterle’s work. He’s absolutely one of my favorites, and although I’ve never worked harder or longer on an essay, it was truly pure pleasure just to get to watch those glorious films again and again. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. :)
DeleteI had a lovely chat on social media yesterday with someone who had studied with Sarris maybe 25 years ago. He admitted that he was fairly bemused by the life the auteur theory had taken on, and said repeatedly in class that he regretted how hard he’d been on certain directors in the past, just to prop up his own theory. She said Dieterle's name never came up, but she's a fan like me, and wondered if he was one of the directors Sarris was referring to.
Oh, and regarding Portrait of Jennie, it absolutely has elements that I, too, would normally be resistant to. And yet I quite love it. We should compare notes. As I talk about quite a lot (maybe too much!) in my essay, I think that was one of Dieterle’s greatest gifts, to ease you past elements — in particular, contrivances — that normally would have you heading for the hills.
Tommy, I loved your essay on William Dieterle. The section on Ruth Chatterton was excellent. So many don't realize the extent of her work in the 1920's and 30's.
ReplyDelete"Love Letters" and "Portrait of Jennie" are two favorite films. Superb casts in both. I have heard that Jennifer Jones was a retiring personality. So wished she had sat down with Robert Osborne to discuss her films.
Your writing keeps cultural literacy alive. Which as we are aware is in danger of being eradicated with the recent reelection of the name I prefer not to mention.
Have a wonderful day.
Jim
Jim, thank you so much for the kind words. I confess, I didn’t know Chatterton’s work as well as I should have, until it came time to write this essay. But admiring her so much in The Crash (and knowing about a half-dozen films that she had made) prompted me to check out a half-dozen more. Magnificent actress, sadly largely forgotten today.
DeleteLove Letters is one of those movies I can watch for pure pleasure, just about anytime, and it will soothe and uplift my spirits. I think Philip would say the same thing about Portrait of Jennie. Two extraordinary films: Dieterle at the peak of his powers.
Tommy, this is a magnificent essay. Your husband shared it with our Facebook group. We’ve been discussing it internally, but I wanted to share my thoughts with you here. I consider myself a Dieterle fan, but honestly, I don’t know most of these titles. I’m definitely going to do some serious binging in the New Year. We have a lot of Joseph Cotten fans at the site, so there’s been a lot of talk about him in terms of what you say in this essay – but I don’t think any of us realized how many films he did with Dieterle. Although Love Letters and Portrait of Jennie are personal favorites, I was most interested to see what you had to say about I’ll Be Seeing You. It’s a hard movie for me to get a grip on. The first time I saw it I remember thinking it was, just as you say, slight. Then I watched it again, a few years later, and the level of detail between the two characters drew me in. I found it very powerful. I remember I had given it a 4 at IMDb, and I changed it to 9. Then I watched one more time and I was back to a 4! I’m not the kind of person who changes my mind like that very often, but that movie confounds me, and I was curious what you had to say about it. And I think you nail it. Dieterle makes the movie seem better than it is. There are moments from that film that stick with me, as when Rogers realizes she’s about to step over the state line, or Cotten’s unease at the coffee shop. But at its heart, it’s another of those movies about people saying grace and getting into the spirit of the holidays – and as such, it’s not a patch on something like Remember the Night. But Dieterle manages such strong character moments, he almost convinces you that you’re watching a great screenplay. (1/2)
ReplyDelete(2/2) Because it relates to something you talk about, and you probably know this anyway, I should mention that I was curious to see what the New York Times had to say about it originally. Have you read it? It’s a very peculiar review, in line with what you were saying. Bosley Crowther loved the film - but gave all the credit to Selznick. You would think from the review that he thought Selznick directed it, as if he was determined not to give Dieterle any credit. It’s very twisted. Were there other films like that, where Crother liked the product, but refused to acknowledge Dieterle properly?
DeletePleasure to meet you, Allan, and thanks so much for the kind words. FYI, I too find ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’ hard to get a handle on. I think Dieterle does such lovely work, he convinces you you’re seeing something different — and far stronger — than you are. Amusingly, my friend Tim wrote me privately after I published this essay, making the same comparison between ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’ and ‘Remember the Night.’ And I think the comparison is apt. In ‘Remember the Night,’ the holiday traditions become transformative for Stanwyck; in ‘I’ll Be Seeing You,’ they stand in contrast to Rogers and Cotten’s struggles — and not much else. Parsonnet doesn’t know what to do with the holiday meals, carols, etc., except to play up Rogers and Cotten’s discomfort — and how many times can you hit the same “it’s not like that for me” note?The movie feels paper thin in spots. Like so many films, it’s elevated by Dieterle, but in this case, it’s an unusually high elevation.
DeleteAnd yes, I have indeed seen the Crowther review, in which he basically attributes the success of the movie to Selznick, as if Dieterle sat around on the sidelines. It must’ve pained him terribly to like the movie so much, but you can’t help but feel his glee at finding a new way of sticking it to Dieterle. The only other movie I can think where Crowther adopted a similar tactic was in ‘Boots Malone,’ in which he attributes the success of the movie to the writer, and gives Dieterle a cursory mention at the end. It’s funny: I worked on this essay for about a year — maybe nine months of watching and three months of writing. Near the start of my time watching, knowing I was going to mention Crowther, I took a peek at his Wikipedia entry. It was reverential. Near the end of my time writing, I referred back to that Wikipedia entry and it had been significantly revised, presenting a much more mixed assessment of the man’s work. Perhaps just as Dieterle is undergoing a reappraisal, so is Crowther — but in the opposite direction.
Not to butt in here, but if we’re going to talk the worst of Crowther (at least where Dieterle is concerned - Crowther is my personal bête noir in terms of his treatment of a different artist), I say nothing tops LOVE LETTERS. Tommy, I don’t know how you refrained from mentioning his inane review: “A worse script or less expert direction has seldom been tossed at an innocent star's head.” Really: “less expert direction”? It doesn’t take more than a pair of eyes and ears to appreciate Dieterle’s direction. I don’t understand how Crowther, just a couple years into his job at the Times, managed to keep it, writing hyperbolic hate mail like that.
DeleteObviously, since Clark and I have watched Love Letters more times than I can count, I’ve also checked out any number of online reviews. It’s funny how many of them condemn Crowther. One calls him “the New York Times film critic at the time, who never liked anything.” Another asks, “Did you guys ever hear of Bosley Crowther, New York Times übercritic of the midcentury? He hated almost everything.” There’s a YouTube video called “The Blustering Bosley Crowther.” So I think when you suggest that people are reassessing his tenure at the Times in a negative light, you’re spot on.
Oh, and Tommy, I forgot to ask. You say of Love Letters that it would be easy to read a synopsis and presume it was sentimental twaddle. Those were the exact words Crowther used: “sentimental twaddle.” Coincidence or intentional?
DeleteOmigosh, total coincidence! I’ve never read the Crowther review. I simply knew how dreadful it was, and knew the one sentence you quoted in your previous comment. I deliberately avoided the rest — I love the movie so much, I knew it would just anger me, and I’m saving my anger these days for things I can actually fix. :)
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