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"Oh Art, she is a lovely rake / We gladly starve for the old girl's sake!" Not Puccini's Latin Quarter but MGM's, the rooming house may be too roomy yet the emotions within ring as robustly as a tenor's. The Bohemian condition, perpetually one coin away from the streets, writing or painting or composing can't keep the landlord at bay. The aspiring playwright (John Gilbert) dashes off articles for The Cat and Dog Fancier's Journal to pay the rent, next door is the little seamstress (Lillian Gish) whose trip to the pawnshop is a masterclass of heartbreaking pantomime. The decadent viscount (Roy D'Arcy) has designs on her but she only has eyes for the jealous fool, whose theatrical magnum opus could even rival "that man Victor Hugo." (Inspired, he finishes the first act and eagerly enacts all parts, leaping from side to side as his inamorata plays rapt audience.) Abusive creatives, tubercular muses, lecherous patrons, all tragic and comical to King Vidor. Déjeuner sur l'herbe, a flirtatious whirl in the woods and suddenly the camera moves along with the happy couple. Degas dancers on stage, the view is from tilted binoculars so that the curtain falls like a diagonal wipe. "Borrow" is a vulgar word, proclaims the piccolo player, his preferred term might be J. Wellington Wimpy's: "I offer you the honor to render temporary pecuniary assistance to genius." Warmth from a furnace, tears in a glass of wine, ecstasy of romance and death, grist for Gish's expressive mill. Her superimposed visage beams over the hero's triumphant bow, meanwhile she drags herself from her deathbed for one last embrace, frail yet burning. The great analysis is by Mizoguchi in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums. With Renée Adorée, George Hassell, Karl Dane, and Edward Everett Horton. In black and white,
--- Fernando F. Croce |